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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:
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
Our newest and most recently updated CDs:
What do Balzac, Dumas, Flaubert, Tolstoy, Machiavelli, Tasso, Luther, Ibsen,
and Goethe have in common? They are all on the same World
Literature 2-CD set with 2713 books (some in the original language,
some in English, and some in both), in plain text, with software that lets
you listen as well as read. Complete
table of contents for World Literature.
Table of contents for English-only version.
Review in
Large Print Reviews
What
do Louisa Mae Alcott, Lucy Maud Montgomery, Lewis Carroll, Frank Baum,
Edgar Rice Burroughs, and Eleanor Porter have in common? Their works are
on the same Children's
Book CD, with 1856 classic children's books, in plain text,
with software that lets you listen as well as read. Complete
table of contents
Review in
Large Print Reviews
What do Mark Twain, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Jack London, Edith Wharton, Walt
Whitman, and Zane have in common? Their works are all on the same American
Literature 2-CD set, with 2429 books by 680 authors.. Complete
table of contents
Books
from the Great Books of the Western World ® Collection
is based on the table of contents of the 54-volume first edition published
by Encyclopaedia Britannica Inc. in 1952. This CD contains electronic versions
of about two thirds of the works in that printed book collection. The Table
of Contents shows the organization by volume of the original collection.
The folders/directories are organized by author.Books originally written
in languages other than English appear on the CD in English translation,
but often not the same translation as the printed collection. Of the 54
volumes, this CD contains the complete or nearly complete contents of 29
volumes and partial contents of 14 volumes. It omits the contents
of 11 volumes. Omissions are noted in the Table of Contents in brackets
and with the word "unavailable". All these books are in plain text form,
except one by Euclid which is in Acrobat (.pdf) to show the illustrations.
Table of Contents
Great Books of the Western World ® and Britannica ®
are Trademarks of Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc.
Books
from the Harvard Classics ® Collection is
based on the table of contents of the Harvard Classics ® set of books
AKA Dr. Eliot's Five Foot Shelf (a 51-volume collection of great works)
first published in 1909 plus the Harvard Classics ® Shelf of Fiction
(a separate 20-volume collection) first published in 1917. Both those
collections were edited by Harvard University President Charles W. Eliot
(1834-1926). This CD contains electronic versions of the great majority,
but not all of the works selected by Dr. Eliot. Books originally
written in languages other than English appear here in English translation,
but often not the same translations as the original. The Table of
Contents shows the organization by volume of the original Harvard Classics
® collection. The folders/directories are organized by author.
All these books are in plain text format. Table
of Contents
The Harvard Classics ® a Registered Trademark of the President
and Fellows of Harvard College.
16
books by Benjamin Disraeli
and
three by his father Isaac Disraeli. In addition to being a popular novelist,
Benjamin Disraelli served in government for four decades, twice as prime
minister (in fierce competition with Gladstone). For his service,
he was given the title "Earl of Beaconsfield." Table
of Contents
Books
by "Victor Appleton", the pseudonymn used by the authors of
the Tom Swift series. This CD contains the first 25 books of the Tom Swift
series, the only ones published in the US before 1923, and hence clearly
in the public domain, plus 2 books of the Moving Picture Boys series, also
attributed to "Appleton". Table
of Contents
Books
Behind the Classics Illustrated ® Comics. Back in
the 1950s I was an avid reader and collector of Classics Illustrated ®
comic books. I bought every one I could find in stores, got a monthly subscription,
and ordered everything else from the publisher as back issues. And I revered
the original books honored by inclusion -- those were the true "classics";
and went out of my way to buy them and read them. About ten years ago,
when I realized that the paper was deteriorating and that the comics would
all turn to dust before my grandchildren could enjoy them, I sold the collection
through Ebay. Now it finally occurred to me that all but 26 of the original
168 classics are now in the public domain and available in electronic form.
Here I have assembled all those onto a single CD.
Table of Contents
Classics Illustrated ® is a Trademark of the Frawley Corporation.
Mercy
Otis Warren -- Her five plays plus her unique and detailed
history of the American Revolution. Table
of Contents
Vintage
Magazines -- 1058 issues from 35 classic magazines. This collection
includes Samuel Johnson's Rambler and Adventurer, Addison and Steele's
Spectator and Tatler, Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine 19 issues from 1842-1844,
Chamber's Edinburgh Journal 38 issues from 1852, Notes and Queries
86 issues from 1849-1853, Mirror of Literature 197 issues 1827-1832, Punch
290 issues from 1841-1920, 1914, 1917, and 1919, The Atlantic Monthly 1857-1867,
Bay State Monthly 20 issues from 1884-1886, Lippincott's 31 issues from
1873-1885, Scientific American 70 issues from 1867-1898, and Punchinello
all 39 issues from 1870.
Table of contents
Books
of the Western Canon: Great Books by Essential Authors is based
on the lists of "great books and essential authors" in the appendixes of
"The Western Canon" by Harold Bloom. Here we provide the full-text of many
of the books he recommends, from the Theocratic, Aristocratic, and Democratic
Ages (from the dawn of civilization up through the end of World War I),
organized the way he presents them: 797 books by 204 authors. Many of these
books would be very hard to find and very costly in printed form. Complete
table of Contents
Fantasy
contains
235 books, including very early fantasy, such as The Odyssey, Ovid's Metamorphoses,
Rabelais, Shakespeare, and Gulliver's Travels; and 19th and early 20th
century, such as works of Bangs, Baum (Oz), Burroughs (Tarzan), Cabell,
Lewis Carroll, Arthur Conan Doyle (Lost World etc.), Haggard (King solomon's
Mines etc.), Kipling, Le Fanu, MacDonald, Morris, Nesbit, Stockton, and
Jules Verne, plus A Connecticut Yankee and The Secret Garden. It
even has the contemporary fantasy satire The Lizard of Oz by Seltzer. Table
of Contents
Myth,
Legend, Saga and Epic --186 books, including Gilgamesh, Beowulf,
Arabian Nights (complete), tales of King Arthur and the Knights of the
Round Table, Milton, The Egyptian Book of the Dead, The Song of Roland,
Legends of Charlemage, Faust, Greek mythology, Homer, Dante's Divine Comedy,
Ariosto, Tasso, Virgil, Norse sagas, Hindu epics, Native American myths
and legends, The Mabinogion, The Lay of the Cid, and even War and Peace
and Don Quixote. Table of
Contents
Ghost,
Horror, and Supernatural Stories, with 93 books, includes works
by Poe, LeFanu, Hodgson, Stoker, and Oscar Wilde. It covers stories about
ghosts, vampires, werewolves, and other supernatural creatures. These are
works of fiction, not myths or folklore. It also includes Gothic Novels
and books about Halloween. Table
of Contents
Short
Stories: the ultimate collection. This CD contains over 3901 stories,
including collections of interwoven stories such as The Arabian Nights,
Canterbury Tales, and The Decameron. All the stories are in English and
in plain text format. The CD is available for $19 at our online
store.Complete Table
of Contents
Our
Drama
CD contains 733 plays by 115 playwrights, including Calderon,
Chekhov, Congreve Gilbert and Sullivan, Goethe, Ibsen, Moliere, Shiller,
Ben Jonson, Kliest, Shakespeare, Synge, and Wilde, and 77 anthologies and
books about drama.
Complete
table of contents
Early
Geology and Geography, with 28 books includes Herodotus and
Marco Polo, as well as Sir Charles Lyell. Table
of Contents
Early
Medicine and Health contains 69 classic books about medicine
and health, including "Gilbertus Angelicus: Medicine of the 13th Century"
by Henry Handerson, "Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine" by George Gould
and Walter Pyle, Cobb's "Anatomy", "Cluthe's Advice to the Ruptured", "
The Royal Road to Health" by Charles A. Tyrrell, "Practical Physiology"
by Albert Blaisdell, "The Evolution of Modern Medicine" by William Osler,
and "Notes on Nursing" by Florence Nightingale.
Early
Law and Crime contains 87 public domain books -- 47 "non-fiction"
books about Crime and 40 books about Law. The "crime" includes Celebrated
Crimes by Alexandre Dumas (18 books in a single file), A Book of Remarkable
Criminals by H.B. Irving, Courts and Criminals by Arthur Train, Crime and
Its Causes by William Morrison, Crime: Its Cause and Treatment by Clarence
Darrow, Criminal Psychology by Hans Gross, Criminal Sociology and The Positive
School of Criminology by Enrico Ferri, Lives of the Most Remarkable Criminals
(1735), London's Underword by Thomas Holmes, and True Stories of Crime
by Arthur Train. The "law" includes The Common Law and The Path of Law
by Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., An Essay on Trial by Jury by Lysander Spooner,
The Oldest Code of Laws in the World by Hammurabi, The Bouvier Law Dictionary,
and The English Constitution by Walter Bagehot.
Fairy
Tales and Folk Tales contains 67 collections of fairy tales
and folk tales (including all the Andrew Lang fairy books), plus 5 books
about fairy and folk tales. By "fairy tales" I mean story for the sake
of story, usually with magical content, traditionally told to children.
I also include tales associated with particular countries or cultures that
might have some anthropological value. And in addition to story collections,
I include a few books about fairy tales and folk tales. I avoid myths (which
border on religion) and legends (which border on history), but the borderlines
are fuzzy.
64
books by and about John
Bunyan, 17th century Christian writer and preacher (author
of The Pilgrim's Progress).
Table
of Contents
5
books and 834 sermons by Charles
Spurgeon, renowned 19th century Baptist preacher, including
the Teasury of David, with commentaries on each of the 150 Psalms. Table
of Contents
Early
Economics and Business contains 53 classic books on economics
and business, including works by Adam Smith, Marx, Engels, and Henry Ford.
Table
of Contents
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 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
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). 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. 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.
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.
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.)
Description of Richard Seltzer's consulting business Recent articles
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.
Article:
Cyberwinds --
which way are the winds of change blowing? provides updates regarding
sites/services mentioned in this book.Ethiopia, A Country-Study, compiled by the Library of Congress, the complete text of this book-length document 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.
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 The Russia Hand by Strobe Talbott Thank you, Matthew Pearl (a review of The Dante Club) Complete list of books read by Richard Seltzer over the last 50 years (over 3000 of them) Book Reviews and Other Writings by Deane Rink:
Bob
Seltzer's Chess Games by Bob Seltzer. Bob Seltzer was five
times national champion for his age group. This CD contains all his tournament
games from raw beginner to master and U.S. Cadet Champion (from ages 9
to 14, from unrated to 2353). By seeing how he learned from his mistakes
and rapidly improved, you can improve your own game.In a typical month, we get about half a million page views, from about a quarter million visitors. This traffic comes to us because of our text content, which is well-indexed at search engines.
This site is published by B&R Samizdat Express, 33 Gould St., West Roxbury, MA 02132. 617-469-2269 seltzer@samizdat.com
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