One of the problems I’ve always had with online eBook readers is that they just doesn’t have the same look and feel of a real book or magazine. When you hold a book in your hands, you can grip the corner of the page and curl it back just as your finishing the last few words on the page, and then quickly toss the page over to the next page so you can continue without pause. This is part of the experience of reading, and it’s something that is very hard to give up as you transition to the digital medium of the Internet.
Luckily, there are eBook reader devices that now incorporate an animated sort of “page turning.” Those features are awesome, but they don’t help you much when you’re trying to read an eBook on your computer when you’re not mobile. This is why I was very excited to discover an awesome desktop eBook reader called MartView.
MartView is a unique digital reader application for Windows (Mac version available soon) that recreates this “authentic” reading experience. Using this reader, you can also read regular PDF documents as well, such as a free PDF eBook download. You can slowly or quickly turn or bend pages, scroll through documents using a variety of methods and orientations, and much more.
MartView Makes Reading Digital Documents Enjoyable
What I love about the free MartView eBook reader is the design that’s very easy on the eyes, and the functionality that really does make you feel like you have ultimate control over the motion of the book and the flow of your reading. Once you download and install the application, it looks like this.
Normally, the top menu bar is hidden, but when you bring your mouse near the top of the screen, it drops down. There are a lot of cool options available for how you’d like to navigate through your eBook. You can simply flip through (my favorite), or you can opt for the standard horizontal or vertical slide formats of typical PDF readers.
In the image below, I’ve grabbed hold of the lower right corner of the page and I’m turning the page in the example eBook. This shows the page in mid-flip, but you can actually hold it there as you would with a normal book. You can put it back if you want, or continue on to the next page. It’s a very cool feeling to have so much control over the motion of the page, and the shading and animation really makes it feel like you’re looking at a real book.
Changing views is as easy as clicking on the drop-down menu bar. Here, I’ve instantly changed the navigation to the vertical slide option. In this format you can use the scroll-bar (or your mouse scroll) to scroll up and down the entire eBook.
Another very cool view is the “thumbnails” view. Rather than sifting through a table of contents to find the page that you’re looking for, why not browse a thumbnail of all pages of the eBook? This makes it very easy to find diagrams or images that you want to refer back to but don’t remember the exact page.
You can use the MartView reader as a standalone PDF or eBook reader, but it also has the ability to connect through your Internet connection and download from the huge library of free eBooks at the MartView website. You don’t need an account, all you need to do is install the reader and you can start downloading free eBooks.
You can also create and upload your own eBooks and store them on the MartView library.
You can create and upload an eBook to the MartView library from a PDF eBook, from a collection of your own personal images, or from an archived collection of images and share your eBook with the entire community.
The upload process is really simple and fast. Just select the file, give it a title that you’ll remember easily (and a good category), and upload it to MartView.
The coolest part of MartView, in my opinion, is the library. I love free reading material, and the volumes of free content that you’ll find at MartView is seemingly unlimited. There are entire collections of online magazines, sorted into categories like Business & Finance, Computers & Tech and a lot more.
Of course, you aren’t limited to downloading and reading MartView eBooks only. You can open up any PDF on your computer or that you download from any other PDF-based eBook site using your MartView reader. Here, I opened a free download of A Tale of Two Cities.
You’ll notice that the shading and appearance gives your PDF document the look and feel of a real book. Just start paging through and enjoy your reading experience!
As with many good things, there’s a downside. I did notice that MartView is a dog when it comes to memory consumption. It’s best used with all other applications shut down and devoting the entire screen to the reading experience. Unless you have some massive memory, I wouldn’t advise trying to accomplish much else with your computer while running MartView.
With that said, I really like the software and plan to use it whenever I have some free time to sit back and enjoy an e-magazine or a free eBook.
My column today focuses on the White House lawyer behind the Sestak stonewall: Bob Bauer — a familiar figure if you’ve been reading this blog closely. He’s the hubby of former White House Fox-basher-in-chief Anita Dunn and a veteran Democrat legal fixer.
In related news, here’s a new video contrasting Sestak’s accusations with Team Obama’s blubbering denials:
More follow-up from Jeffrey Lord at AmSpec and Ben Barrack at the American Thinker.
***
Look who’s behind the White House/Sestak stonewall
by Michelle Malkin
Creators Syndicate
Copyright 2010
After three months of zipped lips and feigned ignorance, the Obama White House is finally taking real heat over Pennsylvania Democratic Rep. Joe Sestak’s consistent claims that the administration offered him a job to drop his Senate bid. Now it’s time to redirect the spotlight where it belongs: on the top counsel behind the Washington stonewall, Bob “The Silencer” Bauer.
On Sunday, White House spokesman Robert Gibbs glibly asserted that “lawyers in the White House and others have looked into conversations that were had with Congressman Sestak. And nothing inappropriate happened.” With whom were these conversations had? Gibbs won’t say. Neither will Attorney General Eric Holder, who dismissed “hypotheticals” when questioned about Sestak’s allegations last week on Capitol Hill by GOP Rep. Darrell Issa of California. Holder is simply taking his cue from the commander-in-chief’s personal lawyer and Democratic Party legal boss.
You see, on March 10, Issa also sent a letter to Bauer, the White House counsel to the president, requesting specifics: Did White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel contact Sestak? Did White House Deputy Chief of Staff Jim Messina (whom another Democrat, U.S. Senate candidate Andrew Romanoff, has accused of offering a cabinet position in exchange for his withdrawal)? How about the White House Office of Political Affairs? Any other individuals? What position(s) was/were offered in exchange for Sestak’s withdrawal? And what, if any, steps did Bauer take to investigate possible criminal activity?
Bauer’s answers? Zip. Nada. Zilch. While the veteran attorney ducked under a table with the president, Gibbs stalled publicly as long as he could — deferring inquiries about the allegations one week by claiming he had been “on the road” and had “not had a chance to delve into this,” and then admitting the next week that he had “not made any progress on that,” refusing the week after that to deny or admit the scheme, and then urging reporters to drop it because “whatever happened is in the past.”
But the laws governing such public corruption are still on the books. And unlike Gibbs, the U.S. code governing bribery, graft and conflicts of interest is rather straightforward: “Whoever solicits or receives … any … thing of value, in consideration of the promise of support or use of influence in obtaining for any person any appointive office or place under the United States, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than one year, or both.”
Bauer is intimately familiar with electoral law, Barack Obama, ethics violations and government job-trading allegations. And he’s an old hand at keeping critics and inquisitors at bay.
A partner at the prestigious law firm Perkins Coie, Bauer served as counsel to the Democratic National Committee, the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and Obama for America. He also served as legal counsel to the George Soros-funded 527 organization America Coming Together during the 2004 campaign. That get-out-the-vote outfit, helmed by Patrick Gaspard (the former Service Employees International Union heavy turned Obama domestic policy chief), employed convicted felons as canvassers and committed campaign finance violations that led to a $775,000 fine by the Federal Election Commission under Bauer’s watch.
As I’ve reported previously, it was Bauer who lobbied the Justice Department unsuccessfully in 2008 to pursue a criminal probe of American Issues Project (AIP), an independent group that sought to run an ad spotlighting Obama’s ties to Weather Underground terrorist Bill Ayers. It was Bauer who attempted to sic the Justice Department on AIP funder Harold Simmons and who sought his prosecution for funding the ad. And it was Bauer who tried to bully television stations across the country to compel them to pull the spot. All on Obama’s behalf.
More significantly, Bauer has served as Obama’s personal attorney, navigating the corrupted waters of former Democratic Gov. Rod Blagojevich’s pay-for-play scandals in Illinois. Bauer accompanied Obama to an interview with federal investigators in Chicago. And he’s got his hands full fighting Blago’s motion to subpoena Obama in the Senate-seat-for-sale trial — a subpoena that included references to a secret phone call between Obama and Blagojevich; an allegation that Emanuel floated his own suggested replacement for Obama’s seat; an allegation that Obama told a “certain labor union official” that he would support (now-White House senior adviser) Valerie Jarrett to fill his old seat; and a bombshell allegation that Obama might have lied about conversations with convicted briber and fraudster Tony Rezko.
With not one, not two, but three Democrats (Sestak, Romanoff and Blagojevich) all implicating the agent of Hope and Change in dirty backroom schemes, “Trust Us” ain’t gonna cut it. Neither will “Shut Up and Go Away.”
What did Bob “The Silencer” Bauer know, when did he know it, and how long does the Most Transparent Administration Ever plan to play dodgeball with the public?
penis enlargement
When I was first starting to learn about personal finance, the first book I picked up was George Clason's The Richest Man in Babylon. It was really a great book that taught fundamental truths about handling money well, such as living on less than you make, saving money, and making your money earn money. I just ate up what I read, because it was such good stuff.
The next book I picked up was The Total Money Makeover, by Dave Ramsey. It taught a lot of the same principles that The Richest Man in Babylon did, but offered it in a very practical series of "baby steps" for readers to follow to become financially independent. I continued reading, picking up Rich Dad Poor Dad, then the Millionaire Next Door, and then a few others. By the time I was on the Millionaire Next Door, it became quite clear that they were all offering generally the same advice.
There are some different lines of thinking when it comes to personal finance (think Dave Ramsey v. Robert Kiyosaki), however it seems that whenever a new personal finance books comes out, it's just a rehash of something that we've previously read. A great example of this is Loral Langemeier's The Millionaire Maker. In the book she shows her reads how to have an "extreme money makeover," clearly borrowing from "The Total Money Makeover." All the advice in the book has been in numerous other personal finance books before, and it offered very little new unique and insightful advice.
The same is true for a slue of other personal finance books that come out. If you've read one of Robert Kiyosaki's books, you've pretty much read them all. All of Dave Ramsey's financial books pretty much contain the same information and don't really offer any unique insight compared to any of his other books. When most finance authors write new books, very rarely do they offer a whole lot of new unique insight. The reason for this is simple, it doesn't take a chapter to explain simple principles such as "You should pay off debt" and "live on less than you make." The principles are certainly fundamental, but don't necessarily translate well into 200+ page books. Usually they offer all of the good advice they have to offer in their first book, and after that, they are more than likely just looking for money.
If you've read 5 personal finance books by 5 different authors, chances are you've read about all of the advice that's out there for personal finance. These books all have some good advice, but when new finance books come out, there's rarely ever anything new and unique about it that should make experienced personal finance readers to jump out of their chair and head down to Barnes and Nobel to pick it up.
The moral of this story is that if you've already read a few good personal finance books, be sure to read some reviews of the book before going and picking it up. You can't blame an author for trying to make money, but we need to be a bit more selective in our personal finance reading.
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