to say that this is an essential volume of work for the serious tori collector is almost a contradiction in terms. the serious collector could basically be any tori fan around the world who is slavishly devoted to tori's music & simply must own the rarities no matter how expensive or obscure they may be. naturally, this book would probably not appeal to the casual tori fan who buys an album occasionally at the local wal-mart. if you mainly interested in some basic information on tori & her formative years, you should try the kalen rogers book instead which is an awesome introduction to ms. amos & contains many lovely photographs of the goddess herself. on the other hand, this is a useful reference book if you are seriously into collecting promos, extremely rare vinyl, or the infamous y kant tori read cd. speaking from personal experience, i've found very few of the items listed in this book but i keep it on hand just in case i should run across them at record shows, used cd bins, or perhaps yard sales of tori fans. sad to say, most of these items are either long out of circulation or very few copies were distributed. one interesting fact is that most of the material you will find on ebay are not the original pressings but rather cheap bootlegs(while these sometimes can be very necessary) which are overly priced. I WOULD ALSO LIKE TO SHARE ANOTHER PIECE OF VALUABLE INFORMATION FOR EXTRMEME TORI FANS LIKE MYSELF HERE. if you love live tori material or rare songs which are not in print, you can often go the www.hereinmyhead.com website & pull up mp3s of all your favorite rarities. this is where i have found most of my songs for my extensive tori collection. rumour also has it you can go to www.toritraders.com where you can download full length concerts or cover art for cd cases. from what i've read or heard, this can be done with dial-up service but the process of downloading could take up to five days whereas a high speed connection would only take about five hours. as of yet, i have not tried this so i cannot substantiate the rumour but i found that tidbit to be very interesting & i figured tori fans might find this useful in addition to purcahsing this methodically researched volume of work. needless to say, this collection book sitting on his coffee table or by the computer right near the bible.