Book People Archive

Books on CD and DVD -- "Bookfinder" file complete (an easy way to find the books you want)

I've been working non-stop on our "Bookfinder" file -- a linked list of 
all the nearly 10,000 books at B&R Samizdat Express; and just finished 
it, finally...


This was a very important project, but one that was extremely tedious 
and time-consuming -- the sort of project that you only start because 
you are able to delude yourself that it couldn't possibly be that 
difficult, and then you keep deluding yourself that you can finish 
"soon". 


The problem was that our collection of books had grown so large -- over 
10,000 -- and they were scattered across over 150 different CD 
collections.  Sure if you knew that you were mainly interested in books 
of a certain genre or from a particular time period or on one subject or 
from one country or region, you could go to the CD devoted to that and 
check the table of contents.  But if you were thinking of a particular 
book title or author, you might not know where to look.  


So I created a single file with a list of all our books -- not a 
database, a simple list so you can browse or search. Books with one or 
two authors or editors are listed alphabetically by author. Biographies 
are also listed by the person who is the subject. A separate section of 
the same document lists periodicals, alphabetically by magazine name. 
Another section lists anonymous books, government documents, 
collections, books with many authors, and books with a corporation as 
author alphabetically by title. At the end, I included a list of book 
series with more than one author, alphabetically by series name.


You can use the search function in your browser to look for an author or 
a title. For Non-Fiction, I also included subjects, like "political 
science", so you can search for terms like that.


Click on a link to go to the description page for a book-collection CD 
on which that author or book appears. There you can see the complete 
table of contents of that CD or place an order.


A "work in progress", this list now includes all the books that appear 
on our "Classic Collection" CDs (American Literature, British 
Literature, World Literature, Non-fiction, Children's Books, Religion, 
and Books About Classical Music). All these books also appear on our 
Complete Book DVD.  We have also offer these same books on CDs organized 
by Genre (such as Drama and Poetry), by Time Period (such as Ancient 
World and 16th Century), by Theme/Subject (such as US History and Jewish 
Religion), and by Region/Geography (such as French and German).  We will 
add links from the books and authors on this list to those CDs as well 
and to new CDs as we create them. And we will update this list whenever 
we update our CDs. (We update the typical CD, adding new books, about 
2-4 times per year).


Caution -- This is a very long list (close to 10,000 books and growing). 
 If you read it on your computer, you can use "search" to quickly find 
what you want and can follow the links to the pages with details about 
the CDs. A printout would be far less useful, would fill more than 370 
pages (in small type), and would be obsolete in a few days (when I add 
to this again).


Please give it a try at http://www.samizdat.com/bookfinder.html  
Suggestions welcome, and also (of course) corrections (I'm all too 
human).



Best wishes.



Richard



Richard Seltzer, seltzer@[redacted] 617-469-2269, 
http://www.samizdat.com
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