I beg to disagree. Miss Rand's books are cant for her acolytes.
I always say there is value in anything, and one should read books for their valuable material, and all of them have a load of useless slag.
In that sense, there is a lot of value to Rand. She defined and popularized the "pure" stream of libertarianism as a political philosophy, which was a big part of the US ideological ideal - and this is one of the two ideas that makes America unique.
The distilled essence of anything is likely to taste awful, but its useful to see the pure thing.
And Rand, like her or not, probably did more than anyone to make this ideal popular. Until then libertarianism was either an obscure academic matter or an invisible part of US culture.
Strangely enough, until recently it has always been foreigners who have described it philsophically or aspects of it - Toqueville and Bastiat(Frenchmen), Rand(a Russian), Von Mises and Hayek (Austrians).