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."
at
the Battle of Cowpens, S. Carolina, 1781