banner_homebanner_catalogbanner_critical_issuesbanner_resolving_ideologiesbanner_history-reinterpretedbanner_articles_archivebanner_our_relevancebanner_value_propositionbanner_ebook_guidebanner_sales_policybanner_audio_archivebanner_site_mapbanner_contact

OUR VALUE PROPOSITION

Laying the Intercontinental railroad golden spike
Promontory Summit, Utah, May 10, 1869

by William B. Fox
2 Jan 2008

 

The concept of the "value proposition" is a critical point in my discussion of political and economic issues, such as in my "Resolving Opposing Ideologies" section. It is also an implicit concept in important books such as "In Praise of Hard Industries" by Eumon Fingleton.

The "value proposition" concept normally implies the ability to offer real and useful things to consumers that compete well in a free market by virtue of exhibiting a superior quality to price ratio. It is appropriate that I explain how we try to practice what we preach in the realm of ebooks. .

Public education:

The American public has been tragically misinformed regarding the topics addressed in the Crisis Issues section. In addition, America's controlled national media has heavily indoctrinated the public for decades with the "environmental top down" world view described in my "Resolving Opposing Ideologies" section. Unfortunately this comprises only about 25% of reality at best. Conversely, our self-anointed national media moguls ignore and demonize the three other perspectives which constitute the remaining 75% of reality.

A big part of our value proposition involves helping people who are self-motivated and intellectually curious to deprogram themselves as quickly as possible, allowing them to more realistically adapt and improvise regarding America's coming crises.

Hopefully over time I can steadily add more ebooks and articles that help to provide a deeper understanding of these other perspectives, and how all the pieces of the jigsaw puzzle come together on a political, economic, and cultural level. I welcome donations and other forms of support from people who want to develop a great Internet presence and think-tank capability in these areas, particularly in regard to America's tragically neglected libertarian racial nationalist heritage.

Let me also address how I hope to be of service in terms of the ebook concept as a particular media format.

We Promote Authentic Radicalism

The word "radical" comes from the Latin radix which means "root." Therefore, "radicalism" originally meant someone who wants to understand how things work right down to their root elements. By this definition, all real science and honest academia is inherently radical. These areas of inquiry allow absolutely nothing to stand in the way of gathering real evidence and making inferences based upon sound facts and logic.

Technological innovators are also inherently radical. They are usually obsessive tinkerers who want to thoroughly understand how things work in order to find ways to make them work better. Tinkering is a great way to learn how all the parts of a total system come together. By observing how adjustments in particular parts impact on the overall system, innovators can better grasp how all the parts relate to each other. This deeper level of understanding is usually a prerequisite for identifying the best areas to make improvements.

In recent decades America's national media has pushed an interpretation of "radicalism" that implies extreme leftism and permissiveness. As an example, during the Vietnam War era, America's alien, greedy, and irresponsible national media tycoons dramatically stepped up their efforts to glamorize as "radical chic" people who sympathized with the communist Viet Cong, promoted dangerous drug experimentation, and espoused the nihilistic destruction of family values, European racial identity, and Western cultural heritage. Their clever propaganda simultaneously co-opted and subverted many traditional American conservatives who were also staunchly anti-intervention and anti-war, but usually for different ideological reasons. Long after the U.S. Government's sad military intervention in Southeast Asia ended, America's national media malefactors have continued their relentless assault on traditional American conservative values.

Here at America First Books, we despise this narrow, self-serving, and deceitful interpretation of "radicalism." However, in regard to the earlier meaning of the term, we take the attitude that we can never be radical enough. If we do not continually incite deep thinking, we are not doing our job. We cannot declare ourselves as always being particularly "left" or "right" because we honestly do not know how the chips will fall before the scrutiny of facts and logic in every situation.

The ebook advantage:

There are quite a few advantages to owning one of our ebooks and being able to store it in perpetuity on all the computers you will ever own for the rest of your life. This is true even in instances where a book in the public domain is posted online.

a) You have your own electronic copy forever. If Big Brother tries to shut down various web sites, to include this one (or at least tries to jam our ability to operate from new locations offshore), you still have your own copy of our radical or dissident works. You can endlessly transfer these copies to whatever new electronic equipment you add or upgrade to.

b) No alternative is faster or more immediate. No need to wait several days for UPS to ship you books from Amazon. No need to take a trip to a local book store. Just a few clicks, and you are ready to read.

c) We are always cheaper. When we host current authors, they typically price their ebooks at a significant discount to their paperback or hardback versions. When we handle books that are typically listed as used books or remainder stock for pennies online at eBay or Amazon, we are always cheaper than the minimum of around $3.00 you have to pay for standard UPS shipping rates.

The one exception to "always cheaper" is where we host a "donation" book (we are asking you to make a donation to us), where in essence we provide a PDF version of a book you can also find online. In this case we save you the aggravation of copying, pasting, and formatting on your own.

I have observed a number of cases where online books are incomplete and parts are presented out of sequence. I have also seen numerous cases where online books are missing footnotes, the indices, illustrations, and even major portions of politically sensitive text. Lastly, I have even experienced the following download message midway through copying a classic online work: "The GeoCities web site you were trying to view has temporarily exceeded its data transfer limit. Please try again later."

Our ebooks represent the complete book as it exists in an original hardback version. We sight-check line-by-line to verify every ebook against an actual hard copy either purchased or obtained from a library. We keep a hard copy back up of the original in our own library for verification purposes. We provide everything, to include all illustrations, the table of contents, all footnotes, all references, all appendices, and all index entries. The only adjustments we may make are corrections of some egregious typos in the text, which are noted in the erratum at the end of the ebook. We may also adjust the font size and print per page to better fit an ebook viewer or aid readability, while noting in the ebook text the original hardbook page numbers in brackets.

d) No one can beat the storage convenience. You can store thousands of ebooks forever on all the computer devices that you own. For those who have become annoyed with paying extra rent for extra book storage space in apartments, or having to lug around book boxes every time you make a move, this can become a real plus.

e) No need to remain connected to the Internet. You can now read the ebook anytime you wish, anywhere you wish, particularly if you have a portable computer. The book you want is always there on your hard drive, whether or not your Internet Service Provider is down, or is running slow, or whatever. It is also there in case some web site that has offered some or part of the ebook

f) We have the potential to continue digitizing rare, out of print, yet valuable books. The business you throw our way can sustain us to bring more valuable works into the digital realm

Our unique advantage compared to other ebook vendors.

The PDF ebook advantage: We are currently offering our ebooks as PDF files. (However, as discussed later, our files can be easily converted by the Mobipocket Reader into "reflowable" Mobipocket files suitable for any viewer). The PDF format is simple to use and organize on ones own, and therefore offers many forms of flexibility for its owners.

Free Adobe Reader software requires no special registration. Adobe also offers its free Digital Editions software "to read and manage eBooks and other digital publications. It is built from the ground up as a lightweight rich Internet application (RIA). Adobe Digital Editions works online and offline and supports PDF- and XHTML-based content as well as Adobe Flash® SWF for rich interactivity."

You can transfer your ebooks to your upgrade machines, portable devices, or any other computers as much as you wish for eternity. You can be completely disconnected from the Internet and use your ebook without any problems. You can copy and paste and move your ebooks around to any new folders you create anywhere you wish on your hard drive or offload it all on to an external hard drive, or whatever. In fact, we encourage you to make multiple copies of your ebooks on different machines as backups in case your main system goes down.

We are on the honor system when it comes to passing your ebooks on to others. Please feel free to copy as much as you want for yourself. Please also feel free to pass all our ebooks on to your heirs. However, please encourage all other people to help us make a living by ordering through us. We don't charge that much anyway, and we need the money to continue the work of scanning in and offering new titles.

Please also note that after you buy our ebooks, Big Brother can't track what you have done with it unless you allow him to sneak in spyware to scan your hard drive.

In contrast, many other ebook formats require you to download special viewer software. They want to know something about you for their files when they make you register to activate the viewer. They restrict the number of machines you can transfer your ebook to if upgrading. They want to channel you to buy ebooks designed only for their viewer.

One exception involves the free Mobipocket Reader, which enables a viewer to look at both the PDF files that we sell as ebooks as well as ebooks originally created in the Mobipocket format by either ourselves or by other retailers. The Mobipocket Reader will take one of our "fixed layout" PDF files and automatically create an additional "reflowable" format Mobipocket (.ebook) file. It stores it in a seperate folder on your hard drive that can be automatically brought up by clicking an icon for your ebook within the Mobipocket reader. It also leaves your original PDF file in tact wherever you have located it on your hard drive, so that you wind up with both a PDF file and a Mobipocket file of the same ebook. The reflowable Mobipocket format fits ebook text to whatever screen format you are using. See our ebook guide for more details.

Libertarian/Free enterprise version of Gutenberg

Gutenberg does terrific work, however, like so many things, it comes with strengths and weaknesses. People work without pay to scan books that are in the public domain to provide them for free over the Internet. Typically Gutenberg works appear as raw text, without any of the illustrations, formatting, page numbers, or indices that appeared in hardbound versions. Also, the Gutenberg folks make quite a few typo errors here and there.

Another current weakness regarding Gutenberg is that the offerings tend to stay within political correctness guidelines, rarely dealing with anti-white racial issues, Zionist criminality, Federal war crimes, and other sensitive topics.

Secondly, it is hard for anyone to make a living scanning in books since the business model is voluntary. In contrast, I have more of a libertarian/free enterprise orientation. I think we should be able to develop a business model where we can survive financially and offer intellectually valuable ebooks at very low cost at the same time.

Ebook Viewers

Not surprisingly, new technologies are making ebook viewers ever more compact, multi-functional, and increasingly competitive with the experience of reading a traditional book with printed pages.

One example of an advanced portable ebook viewer is the SONY Reader (PRS-500). Please note the review article by Gary North. Another cool device profiled on CNET in Feb 2007 is Polymer Vision's Readius with rollable display. It is one of the most compact devices on the market with a rollout display that simulates the look of paper.

Another portable reader that tries to come close to the paper experince is the iLiad made by iRex. It carries Mobipocket ebooks. The iLiad reader is sold by eReaderoutfitters.com in the U.S.A. and other vendors around the world. iRex states: "Thanks to the breakthrough technology of its Electronic Paper Display that reads pretty much like real paper, you can read anything, anywhere. Whether it's a newspaper, a book or a comic strip, it offers the perfect readability outdoors in direct sunlight as in a dimly lit interior settings. Find small print hard to read or want to take a closer look at that sales chart? With the easy to use navigation feature, you can scale and zoom to suit your own reading comfort or flip to portrait or landscape orientation to get a better view on things. sketching...The iLiad is not merely about reading… it is about writing too. Thanks to the integrated Wacom Penabled technology you can use the stylus to make notes, underline text and write comments in documents do your favorite crossword or Sudoku puzzles or even sketches and draw."

For smartphones that can handle ebooks, check out the Ciblant product research page recommended by Mobipocket.

Amazon.com offers the Kindle, a wireless reading device. In order to view an ebook outside of Amazon's inventory, one needs to email a Word document file to Amazon, and for a small charge Amazon will make a conversion. According to a review by "Eclectic Homeschool Mom," she discovered a workaround to handle PDF files by running them through Mobipocket Creator. She wrote: "Content - I expected to be able to download ebooks from my local library (for free) and read them on my Kindle. I also expected to simply copy all types of text to my Kindle using either the SD card or the USB. I have found a work-around for my pdf files using the MobiPocket Creator. This works really well except for the Table of Contents - which didn't quite translate properly. I translated several of the free books that I downloaded from wowio. The text came over just fine, but some of the fancy text/graphic chapter headers became separated. Also, some of the books that I wanted are not available in the Kindle store yet. I have used the email conversion and that worked okay."

 


Flag carried by the 3rd Maryland Regiment at the Battle of Cowpens, S. Carolina, 1781

© America First Books
America First Books offers many viewpoints that are not necessarily its own in order to provide additional perspectives.