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. For more information about our site, see the bottom of this page. Enjoy, and please spread the word.

Subscribe to Ebook of the Week and Kid's Book of the Week at the Amazon Kindle Store.

This is an experiment, trying to use the Kindle store as a way to create a community of readers.  Each week, I'll post a new book here with the same product number.  That means that you can pay 99 cents once and come back repeatedly to download new books at no extra charge.

The title of this file will always start with "Ebook of the Week Subscription" so you can easily search for it.  That will be followed by the title of the book currently offered, so you'll know when a new one is available. The image that appears in the Kindle listings will stay the same (the logo for my little company The B&R Samizdat Express).

If you send me a request by email at seltzer@samizdat.com, I'll send you weekly email messages to let you know what's new.  You can also send me suggestions and feedback at that same address.

These are public domain books (no longer under copyright).  Some are well-known  classics, and others are little-known gems, some of which were "out of print" for many years.  Often the books were suggested by subscribers.

How long will this keep up?  I've been sending out a Free Ebook of the Week as an email attachment since March 2004.  Now I'm extending that service so you can get those same books delivered wirelessly to your Kindle in Kindle format.

I'll upload the new book each Sunday.  There's a variable lag time -- typically one to five days -- before an uploaded book goes "live" at the Kindle store.  I'll send out email alerts when I know the new one is live.

Meanwhile Im also be doing a "Kid's Book of the Week Subscription", with the same sort of set up.

Books on CD and DVD

Our online store at Yahoo
PayPal alternative -- Catalogue with PayPal Shopping Cart links
Buy an Amazon Kindle book reader:

Load your Kindle with great books at low cost. Over a thousand 99-cent books for your Kindle from B&R Samizdat Express.
Article: "Why You Should Buy Amazon's Kindle Book Reader"

Our seller's profile at eBay (with all customer feedback)
Our eBay store 
Our offerings at Floofie.com (a new online marketplace)

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).

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 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  our at our catalogue (with PayPal shopping cart links). Or call me, Richard Seltzer, at 617-469-2269 to discuss your needs.

Check our "User's Guide" for suggestions on how to get the most out of your books on CD and DVD

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

Free Ebook of the Week: Please let me know if you want to join our ebook of the week club and/or our kids' book of the week club seltzer@samizdat.com Each week, on Tuesday, 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 and http://samizdat.stores.yahoo.net/kid.html
 

Woodhouse English-Greek Dictionary

At the request of scholars in the field, I am making the rare and very useful Woodhouse English-Greek Dictionary available on CD. The Greek characters mean that "plain-text" isn't an option for this book.  So I did the CD version as a series of images of the pages of the original book, with a linked index page that lists all the English words that are defined. This means that you can search or browse through the index page to find the word you want and then click to see an image of the original book page with that word with the ancient Greek equivalents. Please note that since the heart of the work is in the form of images, unfortunately, this CD version  will not be useful for the blind. Sample the look-and-feel of this book on CD

CD Updates as inexpensive, high-value gifts: Remember, we continually update our CDs, adding new books as they become available. If you have bought a CD from us, you can buy the updates of
that same CDs for just $10 each (up to four times a year). For DVDs, the update price is $30 per DVD. An updated CD or DVD 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. You can order updates as well as new CDs at our online store at http://samizdat.stores.yahoo.net/updatesforcds.html or you can email me at seltzer@samizdat.com or phone me at 617-469-2269.

Multitasking? Want to Listen to a Book on Your IPOD or Portable MP3 Player While Doing Something Else?

Many people ask me if they can listen to these books on their IPOD or MP3 player. Software from TextAloud from http://www.nextup.com makes that possible.

TextAloud, in addition to converting text to voice on your PC (like ReadPlease), makes it easy to convert a text file to an MP3 file that you can then load onto your IPOD or burn onto a CD, which should work in any CD player. TextAloud 2.0 currently sells for $29. (You can also download a free trial version that is good for a limited time). Then you are going to want to pay extra for high quality voices. That Nextup.com page let's you listen to the demos. I recommend the AT&T Natural Voices (Mike and Crystal) for $25.

The files for the AT&T Natural voices are huge — more than half a gigbyte -- so you'll need a high speed connection to download them. (As an alternative, you can pay extra to get the files on CD). And you'll need a minimum of 256 Megs of RAM to run those voices properly.

With TextAloud 2.0 and the Mike and Crystal AT&T Natural Voices,  in just 3 minutes I converted Emerson’s “Self-Reliance” essay (56 K) into a 10 meg MP3 file. I also converted in just 30 minutes an entire book (Emerson’s Essays First Series, 400 K) into a 73 meg MP3. I burned those MP3s onto a CD, and they sounded good on an MP3 player.

Fortunately, TextAloud has a feature that makes it easy to split a large (book-size) file into a series of chapter-size files, before conversion; because book-size files can be very awkward to deal with in MP3 players. (You aren’t going to want to listen to an entire book in one session).

Keep in mind that  AT&T has very restrictive licensing terms that may prevent you from doing the natural things you would want to do with the MP3 files you make. “Audio files created by these voices cannot be distributed to others under the standard consumer licenses.” In other words, you can’t share or post audio files you make from public domain books. If the MP3 files you make are for your own use, fine. But if you want to share them with your class, or your school, or your company, or your school district, or post them on the Web, you'll have to buy an institutional license, for more money.

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