Electronic Books With Jewish Content Hit The Market!!!

COMPANY PRESS RELEASE HOQUIAM, WA – May 10, 1999: Dead End Street 10 September 1999: Two “Jewish” books have been released by Dead End Street Publications LLC. As the largest per capita consumer of printed materials in the United States, the publication of Jewish-themed literature would not normally constitute news… except that these books are not printed at all.

JEWISH SOULFOOD and A LITTLE LOWER THAN THE ANGELS are two new offerings in the latest Internet rage, electronic books. Purchased over the Internet, the books are downloaded and printed by the purchaser or read off the screen and saved in digital format. Dead End Street Publications is a pioneer in electronic publishing and offers a continually expanding array of titles through the company homepage (http://www.deadendstreet.com).

The publication of electronic books with Jewish content was inevitable. The World Wide Web was adopted in its early stages by the Jewish community as a natural medium for a dispersed people to communicate. Jews in Australia take part in on-line Torah study with Jews in Arizona. And everything from an Israeli woven talit to Shabbat candles can be purchased on-line. One can even place a message on the Western Wall through a website. According to Alta Vista, there are at least 1.5 million web sites with Jewish content.

Hard-to-find Jewish-themed books have been available on the Internet for several years. And universities like Yeshiva and Carnegie-Mellon have offered access to large segments of their libraries in digital formats for quite some time. But until now, very few original works have premiered in electronic form. Most authors have chosen to follow the more traditional print path. Electronic books, which offer easy storage, instant gratification, much lower purchase price, and environmental friendliness, have not yet produced many offerings for the Jewish market.

The authors of JEWISH SOULFOOD and A LITTLE LOWER THAN THE ANGELS hope to pioneer a new trend. Written by Los Angeles poet Larry Jaffe, JEWISH SOULFOOD offers digitally recorded audio and musical accompaniment to a collection of poetry spanning more than 100 years of Jewish tradition. A LITTLE LOWER THAN THE ANGELS is a novel based on a modern interpretation of the legend of the Lamed Vav Zadikkim (Thirty-Six Righteous Ones). Written by Marty Gallanter, whose writings on Israel for the United Jewish Appeal have appeared in more than 100 American-Jewish publications, the book tells an extraordinary tale of spiritual fantasy. Gallanter, a native New Yorker who now lives in rural Minnesota, has also written for the New York Times, the Chicago Tribune and the Baltimore Sun.

“We are proud to be one of the first multimedia publishers to offer original works with Jewish content,” said John P. Rutledge, CEO of Dead End Street Publications. “And the superior quality of JEWISH SOULFOOD and A LITTLE LOWER THAN THE ANGELS makes us especially proud. These books are truly extraordinary.” “We are a cutting-edge forum for literary works considered outside the mainstream. And, as such,” continued Rutledge, “we are a natural conduit for the expansion of the Jewish literary tradition into the electronic world.”