World Spaceflight News: Space enthusiasts with a mission!
We wanted to take this opportunity to provide some background about World Spaceflight News (WSN) and the American Space Encyclopedia series of CD-ROM electronic books available here at Amazon.com. In addition to our flagship publication, our coverage of spaceflight and the Space Shuttle includes printed and electronic Special Reports and NASA videos, and the American Space Encyclopedia series of CD-ROMs. We've been space fans since the dawn of the Space Age, providing news coverage - accredited by NASA - since 1983. At WSN, our mission is simple: provide space enthusiasts and professionals around the globe with unique technical information and historical material about spaceflight. We hope that a better appreciation of the complexities and challenges posed by space exploration will foster increased support for man's continued voyage into space. Our love of spaceflight drives our publishing efforts, and we've been gratified over the years that readers from Austria to Australia have found great value in our work. We try to satisfy a wide range of interests by producing a broad selection of high-quality products with exclusive material not found elsewhere. With the introduction of our ever-expanding line of CD-ROM books, we are at the cutting edge of another innovation on the digital frontier, the new world of electronic publishing. The American Space Encyclopedia series is an important original concept allowing the inexpensive distribution of thousands of pages of material that otherwise would remain locked away in dusty archives or hidden on the shelves of engineers.
PUTTING CONTENT FIRST - These CDs are not flashy multimedia presentations from a Hollywood studio or video game producer. Rather, as the name "encyclopedia" implies, they are collections of documents and images in the popular and highly effective Adobe Acrobat PDF format. The discs contain accurate and faithful reproductions of real documents; there is no interface on the planet that will make these authentic documents more interesting or their presentation more interactive!
COMMITMENT TO PROFESSIONAL PRESENTATION - Many hours of hard work go into every CD-ROM - from concept development, research, data gathering, and information requests, to scanning, importing, formatting, and file preparation. Our extensive knowledge and experience helps us identify the most interesting material for each subject.
UNIQUE MATERIAL NOT AVAILABLE ON THE WEB - Every CD-ROM includes material not found on NASA websites, much of it from our own collection of documents. Many of the documents are presented for the first time anywhere! In order to provide comprehensive coverage, some discs also include additional website material, most of which has been converted by WSN into PDF format from cumbersome and time-consuming download files.
USER-FRIENDLY INTERFACE PROVIDES DIRECT ACCESS TO DOCUMENTS - The "Table of Contents and File Navigator" correlates each title with the appropriate file name - there is no confusion associating files with document titles. (Short file names are used for compatibility with older operating systems.) Like a web page, simply clicking on the hyperlinked document name takes you directly to the cover page of the document. Extensive experience has demonstrated that this is the best interface for these PDF files.
HIGH-QUALITY CD DUPLICATION - We use an in-house special-purpose CD duplicator which utilizes blank CD-R discs. This system allows us to modify and update our titles on short notice. In the unlikely event that there is a problem with one of our discs, rest assured that we will promptly replace any defective CD. By the way, published reports indicate that CD-R discs have an estimated lifetime of 100 years, compared to the much shorter life of mass-produced factory-stamped CDs.
We thank you for this chance to explain why we are so proud of our work here at World Spaceflight News!
