Thursday, April 08, 2010

Great deal on Hebrewbooks hard drive

The amazing HebrewBooks.org is offering a special on the external hard drive version of the site. 40,000 seforim for $100 (although it's $120 in Israel) on a 500 mb hard disk drive. It includes everything on the site through the end of 2009, and I think updates will be available.

You can buy it or order it online at:

Eichler's Boro Park
Eichler's Flatbush

To order in Israel, call 057-3144036.



I've been downloading seforim from hebrewbooks for years, but it was only about a year ago that I began adding the tag "hb" to the files I downloaded, so I don't have a true picture of how many I have. But the ones with the tag number about 250, and it's fair to estimate that I downloaded about that same number before I started marking the files. That only adds up to only 1/80th of the whole staggering collection that's available in this deal.

10 comments:

  1. change it from "flash drive" to "hard disk drive". If it were flash, it would be 10 times the price.

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  2. You've been scooped. :-)

    But thanks for posting, as I don't have the audience you have.

    ReplyDelete
  3. How does this compare to the Otzar Seforim drive?

    One concern I've had with HebrewBooks is that while some of their stuff is great, some of it is the original illegible photostats.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Do you mean Otzar Ha-chochma? I don't have that drive (or the hebrewbooks one) but I've used both (online versions) and in my opinion hbooks is superior. In an ideal world both should thrive and I'd have both, but simply comparing the two I think that in terms of sheer quantity hbooks can't be matched, and quantity includes quality, because when you want to see that rare sefer its absence isn't going to help you much. There definitely are some quality issues, but it seems to me to only be a small percentage. I guess it depends on your needs. Also, and this is probably just a local issue with my own computer, I find that hebrewbooks pdfs are a pleasure to open and scroll through, in contrast with, say, Google Books pdfs which are slow as molasses to me.

    In terms of price, someone told me that the Otzar's upgrade to the newest version costs more than this. That must really stink if you bought the last version.

    Unless you're talking about the Otzros Hatorah, which I've never seen.

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  5. This is a pretty good deal, given that you'd spend close to that amount on an empty 2.5" hard drive of the same capacity.

    ReplyDelete
  6. Correct. I think this offer is part of their mission to make seforim available to everyone at no cost. The price is probably just for the hardware. Roshei Kollel are even entitled to the device free of charge, as HB's benefactor's are sponsoring the cost.

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  7. I'd love to find out more about hb.org. Who is he and what does he do? It seemed for a while that he was was photocopying the whole chabad library, but then he stopped. Maybe he had to direct his energies to marketing this product. Is there anyway to contact him to, say, make requests or offer seforim for copying

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  8. You can contact Chaim Rosenberg at oldhebrewbooks@aol.com or write to:

    The Society for Preservation of Hebrew Books
    1472 President Street
    Brooklyn, New York 11213

    You can find this information on the hebrewbooks.org website.

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  9. can one use the Hebrewbooks search options from the hard disk too or is that only available on the web site?

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  10. i have a problem lately with opening hebrewbooks evry time i try to open it, it comes up a box asking if i wanna conect to internet, or work off line, what i didnt had before, i dont know what happend, if somebody could help me with this. thanks from before.

    ReplyDelete

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