The B&R Samizdat Express

The once and future Internet: Here you'll see the Internet the way it was and should be: useful information for free, with no annoying graphics or glitz. This site is designed to provide maximum content for minimum clicks. Browse the links listed below or use the "find" function in your browser to navigate through this index page. Check our sitemap page www.samizdat.com/sitemap.html from which you can get to any other page at this site in one click. Or search within our site using the Google Sitesearch box at the bottom of every page. For more information about our site, see the bottom of this page. Enjoy, and please spread the word.


Contents of this page:

Books on CD and DVD

Our online store at Yahoo
Our eBay store
Our seller's profile at eBay (with all customer feedback)
 The quick and easy way to find what you want and order
New customer orientation (a summary of everything we do related to books)

We are making books available on CD and DVD, at very low cost, selected and organized in an easy-to-use, well-indexed format. These CDs and DVDs contain text, not audio or video; they are designed for PCs and recent Macs (OS X), that have CD and/or DVD drives. Our mission is to use technology to make books extremely inexpensive and easy to use.

Our CDs and DVDs are hand-crafted. The selection and organization are based on our judgment, not automated programs. These are the complete, unabridged books, in plain text format, with no compression and no encryption, to make them easy for anyone without computer skills to read, using Word, a Web browser or any other application that takes plain ASCII texts. You can move a copy of a book from the CD to your hard drive to edit and add notes. You can use the capabilities of Word or whatever other application you use to increase the type size, to copy-and-paste, to print. And the blind can use these books with their screen readers (which convert text to voice).

Our best bargains are:

We also provide CDs organized by time period (Ancient World, Medieval/Renaissance, etc.), by geography (Middle East, East Asia, etc.), by  author (Shakespeare, Mark Twain, etc.), by theme (US
History, Black Americans, Native Americans, Women, etc.), and by genre (drama, humor, philosophy, short stories, travel, etc.)

You can see details (including the tables of contents) of all the CDs at our online store at http://store.yahoo.com/samizdat  Or call me, Richard Seltzer, at 617-469-2269 to discuss your
needs.

Check our "Teachers' and Students' Guide" for suggestions on how to get the most out of your books on CD and DVD http://www.samizdat.com/guide.html

Free Ebook of the Week: Please let me know if you want to join our ebook of the week clubseltzer@samizdat.com Each week, on Tuesday or on the day I receive a request, I send out a free book as a plain-text attachment. This service is intended  to help people get used to reading books on their computer screens. Details: http://store.yahoo.com/samizdat/freeb.html

This CD contains all the selectsion of the Ebook of the Week Club, over 80 books, an extremely eclectic collection. Details: http://store.yahoo.com/samizdat/week.html or http://www.samizdat.com/weekcd .html
 

Brief descriptions of everything we have to offer with links so you can buy directly using PayPal's secure payment system, and avoid shipping costs.

Our newest DVDs:
The Theme Book DVD -- 4156 books for just $69. This DVD combines the contents of 20 Theme CDs. Sold separately, those CDs would cost $380.
The Genre Book DVD -- 2958 books, plus 646 plays, 496 magazine issues, and 2753 stories for just $69.  This DVD combines the contents of 14 Genre CDs. Sold separately, those CDs would cost $266.

Our newest CDs:
English Romantic Poets, with 56 books, includes books by and about Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, Shelley, and Byron. Table of Contents

Anthropology and Myth includes 153 books on such subjects as anthropology, archaeology, folklore, legend, saga, fairy tales, and mythology, organized by country or geographic region. Highlights: the 3 volumes of Bulfinch's Mythology, Richard Burton's complete 16 volume Arabian Nights, the Mabinogion, Andrew Lang's 11 color-coded fairy books, Howard Pyle on robin Hood, The Egyptian Book of the Dead, Arthurian romances,  Beowulf, The Song of Roland, Hesiod, Hawthorne's Tanglewood Tales, Norse sagas, the Nibelungenlied, the Lay of the Cid, and folklore from such countries as Ireland, Wales, Holland, India, and the Philippines. Table of Contents

Language and Linguistics  includes 39 books, covering English, Latin, Greek, Esperanto, and other languages from around the world. Table of Contents

California includes 45 books, with history (with , fiction, nature, and reminiscences, by such authors as John Muir and Frank Norris. 15 of the books deal with San Francisco, and two cover the Donner tragedy. Complete Table of Contents

Sociology includes 84 books of that cover Theory; the Role of Women; the Role of Black Americans; Hygiene, Birth Control, and Sex; the Salvation Army; and Socialism, with books by Jane Addams, Gustave le Bon, Thomas Malthus, W.E.B. Du Bois, Charles Mackay, and many others. Complete Table of Contents

"The American Southwest (Nevada, Utah, Colorado, Arizona, and New Mexico): history, nature, and fiction" contains the text of 28 books. Complete Table of Contents
 

Education,with 60 books, includes books about education; education-oriented philosophy, biography, autobiography, and fiction; and child rearing. $19 Table of Contents

From a recent review: "The texts in this collection include a variety of historically important, and eye opening works, such as The Education of the Negro Prior to 1861 - A History of the Education of the Colored People of the United States from the Beginning of Slavery to the Civil War by C.G. Woodson. Published in 1919, this text was one of the first to books to document the educational opportunities available to African-Americans up until the time of the American Civil War and the fundamental role that the advancement of education for African-Americans played in the Abolitionist Movement. As well as inspirational classics such as The Story of My Life by Helen Keller and Up From Slavery by Booker T. Washington. http://www.largeprintreviews.com/educd.html

Libraries, Librarians and other Book Lovers, with 74 books, includes books specifically about libraries and librarians as well as books by "lovers of books" (mainly essays about books and authors), such as Aristotle, Bacon, Carlyle, Emerson, Howell, Lang, Montaigne, and Warner. $19 Complete Table of Contents

The Messages and Papers of the Presidents compiled by Congressman James Richardson of Tennessee includes the official documents of all 25 US presidents from George Washington to Theodore Roosevelt. It was originally published in 1897, with additions covering McKinley and Roosevelt published in 1902 and 1904. $12 Complete Table of Contents

From a recent review: "Papers of the Presidents is a phenomenal resource that should be in every library - public and private. Students of all ages will find these documents invaluable when studying the lives and actions of the early American Presidents from George Washington thru Theodore Roosevelt. Researches will also value this resource as it provides a convenient and cost-effective means of having easy access to these important documents without the loss of any shelf-space as the entire collection is contained on a single CD-ROM disc."http://www.largeprintreviews.com/prescd.html

CD of the Month: A new project, suggested by one of our customers, will offer collections of books focused on relatively narrow themes. For instance, the first focuses on Evolution. That one has 93 books, but the others will will typically include about 10-30 books (depending on what's available). They sell for $12 each, individually, or $89 for a 12-month subscription.
Evolution includes Forerunners of Evolution, Creationism (Opponents of Evolution), and Broad Applications of Evolution (including Social Darwinism and Eugenics). For details see http://store.yahoo.com/samizdat/cdofmonth.html

Books on DVD: Anyone can put hundreds of books on a single CD, and thousands on a DVD. (Isn't technology wonderful?) But we're interested in providing not just large quantities of books at ridiculously low prices, but also providing a "context". The selection matters. Putting the right books together in ways that make them easily accessible can create a unique context that makes it possible to better understand a region of the world, an historical period, or an author. That's our goal. That's why each of our CDs and DVDs is "hand-crafted" -- selected and arranged by human judgement, not by an automated computer process, with file names that are the same as the book names, arranged first by the major categories used on our CDs, and then in logical folders,by author or topic, and with html indices that make it easy to find the book you want and then simply click to open it in Word or in your Web browser. Related article: www.samizdat.com/dvd.html

Our Complete Book DVD just got a rave review from Large Print Reviews at http://www.largeprintreviews.com/7000bks.html  A few excerpts: "The Complete Book DVD is a monumental collection of books that is a must for every household, library, school, and college student. In this collection you'll find books ranging from the works of Charles Dickens, Mark Twain, Lucy Maud Montgomery, Lewis Carroll, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Jane Austen, Daniel Defoe, Plato, Alexandre Dumas, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Jules Verne, Niccolo Machiavelli, and Julius Caesar. ... This collection represents a tremendous resource for students and for the general reader who desires a convenient and inexpensive means of acquiring, and storing an entire library of literary classics and nonfiction works. The nonfiction books in this collection cover a diverse range of subjects, from history and geology texts to books on public speaking and books about fine art. ... For visually impaired readers, in particular, you will find that this collection is remarkably easy to navigate, despite the size of the collection. Seltzer has painstakingly organized the books into thematic categories..."

CD Updates as inexpensive, high-value gifts: Remember, we continually update our CDs, adding new books as they become available. If you have bought CDs from us, you can buy the updates of
those same CDs for just $10 each (up to four times a year). An updated CD contains all the books, not just the new ones. Buy a new one and give the old  one to a friend. Or buy updates as Christmas gifts. For details see www.samizdat.com/update.html You can order updates as well as new CDs at our online store http://store.yahoo.com/samizdat or you can email me at seltzer@samizdat.com or phone me at 617-469-2269.

What do we mean by "plain text books"?  Many people ask that question --

Plain text (also known as ASCII) is the simplest form of text prepared for use on a computer -- without any of the formatting that is usually specific to a specific program.

Using a plain text book is the same as reading any plain text file on your computer. You can open a plain text document with your Web browser or with a word processor like Word. Then you can use the power of that specific application to modify how the text appears to suit your individual preferences.

For example, go to http://www.samizdat.com/iraq.txt with your browser. If you are using Microsoft's Internet Explorer as a browser, then click on View and on Text Size and see how that book looks with different type sizes. If you had that book on one of our CDs (it appears on our "Middle East: Context for Conflict"), you could open it with Word and then change font or
type size as you would with any other document, if you wish (I keep the default myself). You also could copy the book to your hard drive and save any formatting changes that you make or enter and save notes, or enter and save markers to remind you where you last left off reading, etc. There are many possibilities.

To practice what you can do with plain text on your hard drive, save that file http://www.samizdat.com/iraq.txt as text and then
experiment with the file on your hard drive. (That file is the Library of Congress Country Study of Iraq, from my CD "The
Middle East: Context for Conflict". There's also a CD on Africa.)

Overview

Articles about the implications of this new way of publishing and reading and creating

Free samples in AbookReader format (an easy way to read specially prepared books online, with your browser, and no additional software). Some of our CDs have books in this format as well as plain text.

Free samples in plain text format

 Iraq, a Country Study. As a sample of what you will find on the CD "The Middle Easte: Context for Conflict" we present the complete text of this book. The CD also includes Library of Congress country studies of Iran, Israel, Syria, Lebanon, Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and the Persian Gulf States, each of which is a complete and detailed book, plus classic texts relating to the main religions, history, and literature of the region. For the complete table of contents of that CD, see www.samizdat.com/middleeastcd.html To buy this CD for $29 and/or check our other offerings, please go to our online store http://store.yahoo.com/samizdat

Ethiopia, a Country Study. As a sample of what you will find on "Africa on CD", we present on the Web the complete text of this Library of Congress study, written in 1991. In addition to Ethoipia, the CD also includes Library of Congress country studies of Algeria, Angola, Chad, Egypt, Ethiopia, Ghana, Ivory Coast, Libya, Madagascar, Mauriania, Nigeria, Somalia, South Africa, Sudan, Uganda, and Zaire, each of which is a complete and cetailed book, plus classic texts relating to the region (maining books about European exploration of Africa). For the complete table of contents of that CD, see www.samizdat.com/africancd.html To buy this CD for $29 and/or check our other offerings, please go to our online store http://store.yahoo.com/samizdat

Business on the Internet

  • Description of Richard Seltzer's consulting business
  • Recent articles

    • Internet-on-a-Disk #64 (free, blog-like newsletter),

    Education

    Ethiopia

  • The Folk-Literature of the Galla of Southern Abyssinia by Enrico Cerulli.  (Primary source for folk tales, history, legends, and culture of the Galla/Oromo people, the majority cultural group in Ethiopia. The texts are presented in the original Oromo, with translations and detailed notes and explanations. I input this entire book by hand to make it available to the public.

    • Fiction, Reading, Movies, and Reviews

  • Everything but the Internet
  • The complete text of novels, children's books, articles, criticism, short stories, plays, poems and book reviews by Richard Seltzer
  • Book Reviews by Richard Seltzer
  • Thank you, Matthew Pearl (a review of The Dante Club)
  • Complete list of books read by Richard Seltzer over the last 46 years (over 2500 of them)
  • Book Reviews and Other Writings by Deane Rink:

    • Other Interests

    Family genealogy, history, photos

    Family and Friends

    More about this Web site

    Many of the documents here ask for your reactions, and, with your permission, we are happy to add relevant, well-written comments -- regardless of your opinion -- as letters to the editor. Send your comments to Richard Seltzer at seltzer@samizdat.com.

    Last month (Oct. 2005), we had over 320,000 page views for this site, from over 120,000 visitors. This traffic comes to us because of our text content, which is well-indexed at search engines.

    Do you need help building traffic to your site? Contact Richard Seltzer, the owner/builder of this site seltzer@samizdat.com You can see his business description at www.samizdat.com/consult.html

    To buy a videotape of Richard talking about The Future of the Internet and the Future of Business, go to Amazon.com

    Published by B&R Samizdat Express, PO Box 320-161, West Roxbury, MA 02132-002. (617) 469-2269. seltzer@samizdat.com

    Can we help you build an Internet business? Richard Seltzer is an independent Internet writer/speaker/consultant. Click here for details. or send email to seltzer@samizdat.com

    My Internet: a Personal View of Internet Business Opportunities by Richard Seltzer, on CD, includes four books, 162 articles, and 49 newsletter issues that will inspire you and provide the practical information you need to build your own personal Web site or Internet-based business, helping you to become a player in this new business environment.

    Web Business Boot Camp: Hands-on Internet lessons for manager, entrepreneurs, and professionalsby Richard Seltzer (Wiley, 2002). No-nonsense guide targets activities that anyone can perform to achieve online business success. Reviews.

    Check our sitemap page www.samizdat.com/sitemap.html from which you can get to any other page at this site in one click. Since that is such a big document, we also provide it in pieces, so search engines that only look at the first 100K of documents don't miss the rest: http://www.samizdat.com/sitemap2.html, http://www.samizdat.com/sitemap3.html, http://www.samizdat.com/sitemap4.html, http://www.samizdat.com/sitemap5.html

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