VOLuntarilyConservative

When I first started VOLuntarilyConservative, I posted that I had no plans to place advertisements on this site. Last week, I started an experiment with Google's Adware to see if it took away from the site and if reader's found it beneficial. After one week, it is apparent that no one really cares about those ads - and given what is being advertised there, who could blame you?

Rather than completely kill all ads from this site, I decided to change the experiment parameters. Taking a page from Mark Rose at Right Minded, I turned to Amazon and their ad program, which is much more pleasing to the eye and - more importantly - serves more of a function for this site. With Amazon, I am allowed to pick the books, music, and movies that I want to advertise on this site. If a reader buys a book from one of these links, I get a small percentage of the purchase price. However, it is the book and movie recommendations in which I am really interested. After all, a vacationing Glenn Reynolds has been pointing to his favorite book titles, so why shouldn't I?

With regards to the books, here are a few tidbits. Every Amazon link is a book that is currently in my library. For me to recommend that you buy a book that I don't have on my shelves is disingenuous. The same goes for the CDs. The ones that I have posted are not only ones that I own, but ones that I have been recently listening and enjoy. In fact, they are many times what is playing on my CD-ROM when I am posting. I have also made every effort to link to the actual editions of certain books or translations that I own (such as with the books authored by St. Augustine and Sun Tzu). Some of my favorite books and CDs (such as Matt Staver's "Faith and Freedom," F. LeGard Smith's "ACLU: The Devil's Advocate, Abraham Kuyper's "Christianity: A Total World and Life System," J.R.R. Tolkien's "The Lord of the Rings," and music by The Floating Men) are not included because the specific versions or editions were not available or the ads did not contain a picture, making them not aesthetically appealing. If readers would want me to include those ads, I would certainly be willing to do so.

Obviously, these aren't all of the books that I enjoy. I took this view when looking at my choices: if I had to recommend books to my first-born for reading, which books would I consider essential to his spiritual and ideological growth? Obviously, The Bible (King James Version, of course) would be at the tops of the list, but I figure that most of you already own one of those, so I only included the commentary ("The Classic Bible").

As always, I am interested in what readers think of this change. Feel free to include comments or questions.