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Telegraphing a 50%-Off Take Control Ebook Sale

It’s time for a big Take Control sale, so you can save 50 percent on all our ebooks through 29-May-07 when you order with this link.

Whether you’re interested in setting up a solid backup strategy with the help of our best-selling “Take Control of Mac OS X Backups,” getting the most from your new AirPort Extreme Base Station with “Take Control of Your 802.11n AirPort Extreme Network,” or figuring out the best way to use Windows software with “Take Control of Running Windows on a Mac,” we have the expert help you need, coupled with instant-gratification downloads, free minor updates, and a carefully designed ebook reading experience.

Why have a sale now? History has been sneaking into our lives of late, as it is wont to do, and it turns out that 2007 marks the 200th birthday of Ezra Cornell, founder of Cornell University here in Ithaca. The university has been making a fuss over this anniversary, and in checking out the bicentennial exhibits at Cornell’s Division of Rare & Manuscript Collections, I learned that Ezra Cornell strung the telegraph lines from Washington, D.C. and Baltimore over which Samuel Morse’s famous “What hath God Wrought” message would be transmitted. That message came on May 24th, 1844, or 163 years ago this week.

Ezra Cornell continued in the telegraph industry, the dot-com boom of its time, founding and investing in companies, building telegraph lines, and working non-stop. Since he took most of his pay in stock, he ended up with lots of little telegraph companies scattered around the Northeast (none of which were particularly successful), and in 1855 merged with his largest competitor to form the Western Union Telegraph Company, becoming the largest shareholder for 15 years. Yes, that’s the same Western Union that’s still around today. All that stock eventually made him incredibly wealthy, and he used his money first to found a free public library in Ithaca in
1863, and, a few years later, to found Cornell University.

All this made me think that Ezra Cornell would have particularly appreciated the concept of the electronic book, coupling as it does his interest in the telegraph with his enormous respect for the influence of books. Books as artifacts may not command the respect they did long ago, but I hope you too appreciate our efforts with Take Control to produce something that’s better conceived, written, edited, and published than run-of-the-mill content on the Web. And if you haven’t turned to Take Control ebooks for technical assistance before, this sale is a great excuse to give them a try. (Print books aren’t included in the sale.)

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