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At one level, one would have to be a collector, an Anglophile, or a 1960s pop culture enthusiast to consider this 14-CD set a good deal. In the U.K., the EP ("extended play" single), which contains more tracks than an ordinary single and fewer than an album, has always been a far more popular format than it is in the U.S. During their heyday, the Beatles regularly released EPs in Great Britain, a total of 13 of them, in fact, between June 1963 and December of 1967, and they're all assembled in this box, complete with original art and sleeves in miniature. What that means, of course, is that you get a bunch of CDs, each of which only has four songs on it. That's not an easy way to enjoy the music contained herein, so on a practical level this box has its limitations. But on another level, it's an interesting way to hear and understand the way in which the group's music not only was sold, but the way in which it changed the way people bought music and listened to it. The recording history of the Beatles is usually defined by their 45-rpm singles and their 33-and-a-third-rpm LP releases, for the obvious reason that these were the dominant formats, both in England and the United States as well as the rest of the world, and were the most enduring as well. As referenced above, however, in England the group also managed to release 13 EP 45s, single-sized discs that contained four songs each, between 1963 and 1967. A byproduct of the battle between the single and LP formats, the EP was an awkward compromise, during an era in which most listeners -- outside of the specialized fields of jazz fans, classical music aficionados, and stereo and hi-fi enthusiasts -- tended to reserve their purchasing of LPs to special occasions, such as Christmas or as birthday presents. That went triple for teenagers -- only Elvis Presley's LPs sold especially well among early rock & rollers -- and was even more true in England, where, in an economy that remained stunted by World War II for decades afterwards, there was far less disposable cash among the middle and working classes than there was in America. The Beatles would go a long way toward changing those buying habits on both sides of the Atlantic, simply by making their LPs too good and substantial to be ignored, even by casual fans. But when they started out, EMI in England had every reason to include EPs on their schedule of releases by the group, because of the huge gap between single purchasers and album buyers, comprising millions of teenagers. (There were also two EPs released during their early period of American fame, neither of which sold especially well.) In England, the single and the LP were considered distinctly separate entities -- the EP was where they met. Whereas it could take a year -- or many years in the Beatles' case -- for a group's hit singles to be compiled on an album in England, an EP released four or five months after a single might contain the same hit, presented with three additional songs,
