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TOWARDS COMPLETE, PERMANENT

AND EXTREMELY CHEAP LIBERTARIAN PUBLISHING AND READING,

AT LEAST IN ALL MAJOR LANGUAGES, VIA CD-ROMS etc.
 
 

CD-ROMs AS SUPPLEMENTARY MEDIA TOWARDS A LIBERTARIAN WORLD LIBRARY, ENCYCLOPAEDIA, ARCHIVE & INFORMATION SERVICE OR NETWORK OF INTERLINKED SPECIAL INFORMATION NODES, GOING BEYOND AT LEAST THE PRESENT CAPACITY OF THE INTERNET.

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"Divide et Impera!" (Divide and rule!) Divide the subject and thereby commence to master it!

One can favor competition in postal services without being able or willing to run any postal service efficiently!

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This long & largely alphabetized introduction to the project, a kind of FAQ, alphabetized, is intended to be sent by e-mail and upon request to those who have shown some interest in it, after receiving a shorter introduction or appeal to join it. So far, no one has asked for it. But this is not a reason to keep it ready and improving it somewhat for the few who may come to ask for it. Anyhow, it is already helpful to me as a memory aid. I am one of those who cannot always remember the best arguments just when he needs them.

If you want only a few pages or books on liberty then these notes are not for you. They are for those only who, if they could get it, would want easy, cheap and permanent access to ALL pages and books ever written on liberty and all related subjects, at least for reference purposes, and also the option to contribute to them, together forming a comprehensive and growing freedom library & information service, available in any desired segments on cheap duplicates in alternative media, so far mainly on microfiche, floppies and CD-ROMs. It is not intended to replace Internet use for libertarians but to supplement it - as e.g. printed books still do.

These are just alphabetized notes, often duplicating the same thoughts or one-man brain-storming efforts, either under the same alphabetical term or others. They are, as yet, quite insufficiently edited "raw material" to be used or refined and supplemented or rejected by anyone who wants to think, discuss or write about this freedom opportunity. I do seek further entries to it from anyone. Objections might come to be separately listed and replied to. For the time being, some of them are included here.

Any subject, even a seemingly simple one, has many facets and can thus lead to many misunderstandings, unless the facets are all sufficiently observed and considered. Simple as the CD-ROM project appears to be, one should not jump to conclusions on any of its aspects, either. There are almost always more than 2 sides to any question.

Instead of an abstract of the CD-ROM project, I offer here the shortest advertising for it that I have so far drafted:

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WILL 300 LIBERTARIAN CD-ROMS BE ENOUGH?

HOW MANY LIBERTARIANS DOES IT TAKE TO FILL A CD-ROM?

How many libertarian Mbs can and will you contribute towards a complete libertarian publishing, library & information service on ca. 300 CD-ROMs, with all the desirable reference works, linked, like the Encyclopaedia Britannica on CD-ROM, to Internet sites? Get entered in the still small but growing list of interested people for the cooperative filling of CD-ROMs, all produced only upon demand. They are, currently, still the cheapest, easiest, most powerful, wide-spread & durable enough alternative medium for all freedom books etc. For further details see: www.geocities.com/libertarian_library/ or write to me. - PIOT, John Zube, Libertarian Microfiche Publishing: www.acenet.com.au/~jzube & http://butterbach.net/lmp/lmp_sup.htm - jzube@acenet.com.au - or: P.O. Box 52 (35 Oxley St.) Berrima, NSW 2577, Australia, Tel.: (02) 48771436. No fax!

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A longer advertisement or abstract of the CD-ROM project, coming to 628 words, is appended. You are invited to improve these texts or replace them by more appealing ones.

LMP OFFERS A PRIZE FOR THE TABULATION OF ALL THE PUBLISHING OPTIONS, listing their strengths and weaknesses. See under PRIZE OFFER BY LMP.

WARNING: DO NOT TRY TO READ THIS WHOLE ALPHABETIZED COMPILATION! It is partly repetitive and thus boring, once you have already grasped the essence of the project. I tried to cover many aspects of a simple idea. Rather pick and choose some of the capitalized catchwords & their lines only - as long as this is necessary to convince yourself.

THE BASIC IDEA is rather simple: I would rather have 500 libertarian books, or even more, for $ 50 or even less, on a single CD-ROM or, for ca. $ 250 on 250 microfiche or 250 floppy disks or 6 Super disks or 7 Zip disks - than have them available, if in print on paper, for ca. $ 12,500 or online, if already on line, having to put up with current connection charges, downloading speeds, risks and labours for as much information. WOULDN'T YOU?

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Imagine ALL freedom writings that are of some lasting value being made available on cheap CD-ROMs, floppies, microfiche & or on any other affordable, efficient, easy and permanent enough alternative media, not only SOME of these writings, temporarily, in print or on line, on audio or video tapes.

An ancient Jewish community in Cairo saved every scrap of written paper because the world "God" might occur in it. I would not get that far, not even for terms like "liberty", "freedom" & "rights". But their collection is now appreciated by historians who found out, among other things, that this community, for a considerable time, was almost autonomous although it had no territorial monopoly. Alas, our political "experts" and "freedom fighters" go on ignoring such valuable lessons from history - as well as the libertarian writings relating to them.

The most under-utilized alternative medium, even for libertarian computer fans, seem to be CD-ROMs, at least as far as libertarian publishing is concerned, although they are the most powerful and cheapest of the already widely used media. Alas, so far they were largely only used for music, games, encyclopedias, directories and software and neglected for libertarian literature. Can anything be done to change that regrettable situation?

News, events, essays, comments and appeals, as well as brochures and single books could continue to be efficiently offered online. Whole special reference libraries and collections are another matter. The size of websites is still limited and so are the speeds and safety of most online connections.

Would such CD-ROM literature offers be even cheaper and more convenient and complete than the downloading options are for libertarian literature? I was convinced of this after a recent prolonged downloading chore.

CD-ROMs offer libertarians another great opportunity for their literature. Nevertheless, they hav so far remained extremely underutilized by them, like the microfiche and floppy disk options are.

This is not another scheme to get financially rich in financial terms, although for some activists this might happen, but, rather, one for everyone interested in becoming rich in freedom information.

Better sign up for a speed-reading course, too!

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ABSTRACTS COMPILATION FOR ALL SIGNIFICANT LIBERTARIAN WRITINGS, OPEN TO ALL THOUGHTFUL CONTRIBUTIONS: On CD-ROMs there would be enough space for a comprehensive abstracts compilation for all significant libertarian writings, by all who want to make such contributions. If that compilation is not monopolized by a few scholars but remains open for many entries by anyone interested, people, with their different abstracts for the same texts, then this could be, mostly, fairer to the authors and their works and ideas. It would also make more interesting reading. Amazon.com has begun such an online service for books it tries to sell. Moreover, it would give readers and writers a feedback option. If, some day in the future, libertarian academics want to provide a libertarian abstracts compilation designed for libertarian scholars only, in the conventional way, but on CD-ROM, then they are naturally free to do so, however exclusive their offers might be.

ACTIONS: Actions can be very differently defined, for libertarians as well. I hold that, to finally achieve comprehensive, lasting and cheap libertarian publishing, even if only on CD-ROMs, likewise, comprehensive and affordable library and information services (via selling cheap duplicates of wanted texts), together with all the helpful guides, bibliographies, abstracts reviews, indexes, directories, encyclopedias of definitions, of refutations, etc., could, possibly, constitute the most important libertarian action ever, the one with the greatest influence, although, in the beginnings, they would appeal largely only to scholars and students of liberty - the opinion-makers for the future.

ADDRESSES RECOMMENDED: All those listed should publish or speak or write about this project in their circle, at least pass on relevant e-mail addresses and URLs and, rather than suggesting to the list compiler, to contact certain people with the project, should make the contact themselves. Mostly these people are only an e-mail away and would welcome a suggestion from a friend or associate much more than from a stranger.

ADVANCE SUBSCRIPTIONS TO LIBERTARIAN TEXT CD-ROMS? IS FINANCE NEEDED OR JUST SUFFICIENT INTEREST IN AND PARTICIPATION IN THIS PROJECT? In the past many books were financed via advanced subscriptions. Perhaps the same can be done here? If enough people declared they would be willing to buy the first 10 libertarian CD-ROMs, at a special discount price of, let us say, $ 10 each, then some or the other group of people might thus be motivated to get such first disks compiled and offered for sale. To demonstrate interest by advance orders would be more important to promote this project than advance payments. Seeing that the blanks and the pressing of CD-ROMs are extremely cheap, financial contributions are hardly necessary but text contributions are. Moreover, interest in this publishing and reading option must be sufficiently demonstrated in order to motivate enough libertarians to take the initiative and invest their labour, time, skills and energy in this project. So get listed as a prospective buyer, contributor of text, text compiler, downloader, editor and distributor of such CD-ROMs. Ask for the still all too short beginnings for such a list.

ADVANTAGE OF A COMPREHENSIVE LIBERTARIAN TEXT OFFER ON CD-ROMS: Please consider having ALL freedom texts in your own private reference library, in a powerful and convenient alternative medium. It would require very little space, much less than your still very incomplete private freedom book collection in print on paper, also many more freedom books than are so far offered online. Moreover, you could access all of them offline, in large batches, equivalent to a small freedom library on each CD-ROM, with a cheap CD-ROM drive. Do you know of anyone who possesses a complete freedom library or has access to one? - Are you really a genuine freedom lover if that is not of interest to you?

ADVANTAGES OF CD-ROMS: On the CD-ROMs virus attacks, broken links and other website flaws could be avoided, for years to decades. All the latest virus screenings (there are over 60,000 computer viruses by now) could be applied at the final compilation of a libertarian CD-ROM. - A few could do most of the labour required and pay most of the web connection costs just once. - They would thereby also reduce online congestion and thus benefit uncounted others with the results of their efforts: all libertarian texts of lasting value offered on cheap CD-ROMs, in large batches: 650 Mbs or ca. 300-500 freedom books on a single CD-ROM. (With zipping the number of books on a 650 Mbs disk might come to 2,000 or 2.6 Gbs!) These disks can be mailed around the world much faster than they could be completely read. - Imagine what such a CD-ROM could save you compared with buying these texts in print and getting them mailed to you, or getting them downloaded by you - if you could already get them online. According to my own experience, you could save ca. 400 hours of searching and downloading chores and connection fees with a single CD-ROM, if 650 Mbs of this libertarian information are already available on the Internet. So why isn't this done, the sooner the better? - While the life-span of CD-ROMs is limited, too, they are so cheap that they can either be replaced after a few years or re-copied to fix the text again, for a few years, on another cheap CD-ROM. The better CD-ROMs are now expected to last 50 - 124 years! CD-ROMs, as a rule, when carefully compiled, do not teach you to swear, they would not empty your pockets or threaten your life savings or your standard of living or deprive you, like printed books do, in large collection, of much of your living space. - I presume that on CD-ROMs much larger single files could be offered rather than numerous separate files, chapter by chapter, as happens mostly on the Internet.

ADVANTAGES OF LIBERTARIAN CD-ROM PUBLISHING COMPARED WITH WEBSITES: Mind you, the advantage lies with CD-ROMs mainly for those websites pages offering long or many texts that remain largely unchanged, i.e. classical and neo-classical freedom writings in form of books, long essays or dissertations. Chat sessions, current discussions, news, consumer information etc., naturally, would still be optimally offered online. But why should each libertarian have to separately pay connection fees for downloading or reading time, when he could save much finding and downloading costs, labours and troubles by buying cheap libertarian CD-ROMs already compiled by others and containing all long texts of lasting value that are already offered on the Internet - and much more from other sources - to the extent that they are of interest to him? Current libertarian website publishers might either greatly shorten and simplify their sites or altogether save themselves the costs, labours and troubles, by simply pointing out, their own long text offers on CD-ROMs, as well as those of many others, e.g. on a single or a few of the remaining libertarian websites, in the same way as AMAZON BOOKS are now pointed out on many websites. - Screening against bugs could be made very tight for these CD-ROM editions. Any new bugs would, to my knowledge, not affect prerecorded CD-ROMs that are not re-writable. (They are laser disks as opposed to the magnetic floppy and hard drive disks. Flawed entries could be corrected before duplicates are pressed or copied from it. Updates for one or several libertarian CD-ROMs could, perhaps, be provided on a single website or on a few and properly interlinked ones.

ADVANTAGES OF LIBERTARIAN CD-ROM TEXT COMPILATIONS OVER DOWNLOADING: I have learned my lesson in a year 2000 downloading effort, using up 100 connection hours, costing me ca. $ 300, to download over 14,000 files, coming to 157 Mbs, on CD-ROM. That taught me how much downloading 650 MBs from the Internet would cost me in hard labour and connection fees. Rather than engaging in prolonged and expensive downloading myself, I would, from now on, prefer it very much to be able to buy readily compiled libertarian websites & perhaps much more other libertarian information, not yet available on the Internet, altogether 650 MBs at a time, for merely $ 5 - 50 (the price of a single printed book), on a single CD-ROM, one provided and optimally arranged by some other freedom lovers or network of freedom lovers. On it, instead of hundreds of different link, literature, abstracts & review lists and directories, there could be single directory to the numerous texts included in it. Naturally, I would want included there as well my own LMP literature list of microfiched libertarian titles and some libertarian essays, and, later, some of my own and some of my favorite libertarian books. - Since such offers are not yet made to me, I will try to induce enough libertarians to compile them for anyone interested. While for a single individual the job would be too large, a few dozen or a few hundred libertarians could successfully tackle it & thus market whatever freedom information they possess and want to spread much better, more cheaply and permanently than they could so far. Some want to offload all their distribution troubles onto the Internet. They could still do this but they could also do this via libertarian CD-ROMs that are permanently kept in print and they do not have to maintain a website for their titles. Some people will gladly offer such disks for sale. That availability, like that of printed books and microfilmed texts, could also be announced on the Internet.

ADVANTAGES OF OFFERING ALL LIBERTARIAN TEXTS SOON, CHEAPLY AND PERMANENTLY ON CD-ROM: The greatest advantage of being able to get all freedom writings, together, or large special interest segments of them, at a very affordable price, would be the much greater chance for that freedom knowledge to become, as a consequence, sufficiently spread and effective in the real world. Now not even scholars do have access to all freedom writings. - For instance: No one has as yet access to all monetary freedom writings because such a library has not yet been compiled. Most of these writings are long out of print and inaccessible. But all freedom writings could be cheaply and permanently published - on alternative media and via some collaboration. Then all the collaborators could get all these texts on cheap duplicates. - You would not have to be a scholar to get the chance to access the most scholarly and most skillfully worded information on any freedom subject, fast enough - for most purposes. A comprehensive freedom library on CD-ROM could become the most influential library of all. It could become more influential than all present libertarian think tanks, conferences and meetings combined! It could combine all the information of the numerous free market think tanks and could add all the freedom writings of the past, not only by well-known scholars but also and by many non-academic freedom thinkers. It could offer the best answers to most of the remaining economic, political and social problems. No government could then afford to ignore this information for long. It would have no excuse to offer for doing so. It would risk being by-passed by better informed "juntas", also informed on libertarian putsch and revolution as well as non-violent resistance options, and always able to offer better advice and solutions than any government can. - Each party could be offered the best refutations of points made by parties opposing it and could be offered freedom solutions that would work to solve problems they were so far unable to solved, even when they got into power and had access to tax funds. Nor could the mass media long persist in ignoring this freedom knowledge - when, with a fully developed libertarian information service, all their false or incomplete statements could be easily refuted, almost automatically. Letter writers, public speakers, authors, article writers, would have the best references at their disposal. With this resource at least the libertarian movement, if not the whole public, could be enlightened much faster and more thoroughly. Any libertarian could then e.g. supply mass media with the best possible correction of any errors and lies of any government. With it, it would become relatively easy to enlighten the established opinion makers so that they could play a more positive role. The opinion makers could be systematically supplied with the best freedom answers available to all topics of great interest to them and they would risk losing their fame and positions if they did not finally resort to this information compilation on their own initiative. - If any politician were slow to make use of this resource then his opponents could be supplied with all the information needed to most effectively criticize his statements, programs and actions.. All parties could be offered the best freedom arguments against each other, especially once a libertarian ideas archive is fully developed and offered on CD-ROM and also a libertarian encyclopaedia of the best refutations of popular errors, myths and prejudices.. - Via mobile phones and palmtop keyboards anyone in a public meeting, wanting to question or refute a speaker, could quickly gain access to much of the relevant information. Regular meeting places would have link-ups to that combined knowledge, offered by a single service provider or network. A single CD-ROM drive and screen and collection of 300 libertarian CD-ROMs would not require much space - and would be portable. Screen projectors are also coming down in price, so that an objector's selected text could be screened to a whole meeting. - Before you would attend a lecture or discussion, you could bone up on the subject, perhaps sufficiently to come to know more than most of the present speakers on it, who are not so prepared beforehand. Thus you could induce others to use that resource for all of their future presentations or risk being replaced by those who do.

ADVERTISEMENTS ON WEBSITES AND IN THE LIBERTARIAN PRESS: While it might already be helpful to get either or both of my short advertisements on this subject placed upon a large and well known libertarian website, or the closely related and shortly expressed libertarian library project of John Humphreys, to get the list of interested people finally rapidly increased, the optimal way to me seems to be to place the short list of those who have already shown interest on such a website and to do so in a way that those interested can then and there or any time later on, when they visit this website again, enter themselves, with the wanted details and any self-description they like.

ADVOCACY OF THE PROJECT: Without me pushing explanations or advertisements of this project to many e-mail addresses, the growth of the still all too small list came practically to a stop. It may take ME anything from 100 - 1000 such additional mailings to gain a single new address. In the meantime, one or more of the already collected e-mail addresses or even websites might become defunct or changed. Thus for a whole year, in frustration, and because I had several other urgent projects to work on, I did not push the project at all, apart from mentioning it, with short appendixes, in my ordinary correspondence. By now sending the current list to all so far on the list, I do hope to gain some additional entries. So far I only gained some corrections and additions to already existing entries. - The most promising approach would be for one or several popular libertarian websites to reproduce the list, with a program for self-entry, or to refer, with a short project description, all those interested to a single website where they could add themselves to the list of interested people.

AFFINITY GROUPS AMONG THOSE LISTED: I think that the remaining disagreements among libertarians are considerable and that affinity groups among them should rather produce their own CD-ROMs. Only their combined output, of finally hundreds of libertarian CD-ROMs, all more or less specializing on the main interests of those collaborating in the compilation of one CD-ROM, would be able to represent all libertarian publishing and come, together with the output of all other media, close to achieving a comprehensive and lasting libertarian publishing, library and information services. For instance: The pro-abortionists and the anti-abortionists might not want to appear on the same CD-ROM, nor may some objectivists want to be represented on one CD-ROM together with individualist anarchists, anarcho-capitalists or market anarchists. That should be up to them.

AFFORDABILITY OF ALTERNATIVE MEDIA: (See also under Costs.) Almost every adult and working person in somewhat developed countries could afford to engage in extensive publishing on demand, using affordable, efficient and easy media like microfiche, floppy disks and CD-ROMs, towards complete and permanent libertarian publishing. Since I can't, apparently, convert enough libertarians to take up their microfiche publishing options, I am now trying to interest them in taking up their floppy disk and CD-ROM publishing options - which, as well, they should have fully utilized years ago, since they are obviously part of electronic publishing. Microfiche (COM-fiche: Computer Output on Microfiche) are also long established peripheral print-out options for already digitized electronic texts, which offer great savings in space and costs compared with paper printouts, especially for long texts. Then there are the optically scanned microfiche, whose production is also, at least in the better service bureaus, computerized, automated and very fast in accurate scanning and text duplication. In this respect microfilm is actually still leading edge technology. Most computer fans are insufficiently aware of their micrographic options and their efficiencies. Can they be made sufficiently aware of their CD-ROM publishing and reading options for long pro-freedom texts? Will they learn to apply the precedents of ten-thousands of game, music and software CD-ROMs and of a few encyclopaedias in this format - to their publishing problems with libertarian literature. I can only hope so.

ALTERNATIVE MEDIA: Can we afford to ignore any powerful, cheap, lasting and relatively easy media, now accessible to hundreds of millions, in the struggle for liberty? Has the extensive use e.g. of microfilms for writings and of CD-ROMs for music, software, games, encyclopaedias and attachments to computer magazines nothing to teach us?

ASSEMBLY OF THE MATERIAL FOR ONE LIBERTARIAN CD-ROM: While that would be up to the group of like-minded people, who would, between them, try to assemble, produce and distribute a libertarian CD-ROM, it seems obvious that material could be collected a) by downloading from those websites permitting such usage, b) it could be sent by e-mail, in batches up to about 1 Mb and via floppy disks, that could, zipped, contain up to ca. 6 Mbs and also on mailed CD-ROMs that are so far only partly filled and whose producers want to gain whatever benefits they could by seeing their material combined with other libertarian material of a kind that they do also like. They would have to agree upon a compiler and editor or, between them, if they can afford this, try to hire a professional. Most likely, if the list of interested people is already long enough, there would be people listed who are able and willing to do this a) as a labor of love and b) as a way to advertise their own material and also their ability to compile such CDs effectively for others.

BACK ISSUES OF LIBERTARIAN MAGAZINES: These periodicals could, perhaps, be won over to publicizing and using this option if the advantages of publishing and selling their back issues in this format were sufficiently described to them. Then the examples of these CD-ROMs could inspire the compilation and production of many other libertarian CD-ROMs. Once screen reading is popular enough they might come to convert altogether to website plus floppy disk and CD-ROM publishing, thereby reducing their publishing expenses and risks to a minimum. They might also come to add one to several CD-ROMs to their current issues, as many computer magazines do, containing e.g. libertarian books that are long out of print and out of copyrights.

BALL IN YOUR COURT: CD-ROMs are "balls" in a world-wide pro-freedom game and struggle. Please carry, throw or kick them as far as you can in the right direction, towards our goals. Indeed, they do not constitute the only game in town. But, do fairly compare them and realize and utilize their potential.

BENCHMARK TESTING FOR ALL ALTERNATIVE MEDIA: Generally it is assumed that the Internet is ideal for gathering and spreading all kinds of information and that it can do this in any quantities. But can you, vor instance, compile or download from it a tabulation that would compare all the cost savings per page and other conveniences - and inconveniences - involved with all of the alternative media, so that, with the aid of such a tabulation, everyone could make a sufficiently informed decision on his use of alternative media? The Internet as well as the mass media have left most people, even scholars and journalists, still very uninformed on all their alternative media options. A fair benchmark test comparing all of them could greatly contribute to diminish that ignorance. See the PRIZE offered by LMP.

BIBLIOGRAPHY, COMPREHENSIVE, OF ALL FREEDOM WRITINGS: One of several primary aims of extensive libertarian CD-ROM publishing would be to achieve, finally, the compilation & publication of a comprehensive freedom bibliography. It should point out the existence of texts in all alternative media as well and should point out that all its scarce and unpublished or out of print titles could and should be reproduced on one of the alternative media. By means of a common PROJECTS LISTING much duplication of such publishing efforts could be avoided. Via e-mails to one agreed-upon bibliography compilation centre, a comprehensive libertarian bibliography could fast be built up. Many short ones could already be downloaded from the Internet and then automatically sorted together. I have often suggested that it might be started by libertarians with private collectors of such literature merely listing all the rarer freedom titles in their possession, on their PC and then sending these usually rather short lists to a centre, on a floppy disk or by e-mail. A complete freedom bibliography, e.g. if it listed the location of rare titles, could be a great help in promoting publishing on alternative media for titles that are now hard to access. - People who have seen the length of the LMP literature list have often misunderstood it as a mere bibliography, rather than the offer of the full texts on microfiche. They are not used to as long literature lists. In my LMP series I offer, already digitized, a free banking bibliography of 126 pages, compiled in 1989 & still very incomplete, and a panarchistic bibliography of ca. 56 pages, apart from some bibliographies and literature lists offered by others. I presume that a comprehensive libertarian bibliography would come to ten-thousands of pages and that it would thus be almost impossible to find a paper publisher for it. But on CD-ROM it could be easily and cheaply published, upon demand, together - with much other material, and also annually updated. Chris Tame's libertarian bibliography, which I have not seen yet, was expected to come to 1,800 pages in 3 volumes, alas, again only in print on paper, for which a large price would have to be charged. And how long would it remain in print?

BIG BUSINESS? It is not my intention to establish or suggest only a single organization that provides this service for all libertarians - but if anyone wants to establish such a service or business then he should be free to make his proposal to all those listed.

BOOK OFFERED ONLINE: Libertarian Books on the Internet: There are all too few of them so far, as far as I could find out. They could all be offered much more economically and conveniently if combined on a CD-ROM, in a single large batch. But I doubt that all of them would already suffice to fill a single CD-ROM. If you know better, please tell me. Please inform me as well why they should not rather be offered together, on a single CD-ROM, rather than on xyz different websites, from which they have to be downloaded, expensively and time-consumingly, by every libertarian interested in them, chapter by chapter. I'm somewhat peeved with the way books are offered on the IN, in many sections rather than in a single large file. So far I found only one long libertarian text there that was offered in a single file, I believe it was Proudhon's book on property - and my system would not download it as a single file! I might have succeeded if I had marked and downloaded segments separately. Anyhow, rather than tediously downloading books from the Web, I, for one, would rather buy a whole small freedom library on a CD-ROM, saving me in labour, troubles and all-over costs.

BOOKLOVERS AS COLLECTORS: Even if, one day, all freedom books and all other books will become available online, old collecting and reading habits will die only slowly. Book lovers will continue to collect printed books - and others, who want to acquire more texts or want them more cheaply, will come to collect e.g. CD-ROMs. That does not reduce the value of the availability of books on line - if they are made thus available. CD-ROMs can at least play a supplementary role.

BOOKS, LIBERTARIAN, WITH A CD-ROM INSERT? In this format not only could the whole book be included, preferably as a single file, for word searches, but a very extensive alphabetical index and very long bibliography could be included, as well as some relevant essays by the author or some favorite writings by others, relating to the topic of the book. The author could also reserve the right to reproduce the book on his own account on CD-ROM, in case the publisher does not do this and also lets the book get out of print. Moreover, he could declare his readiness to combine his book offer with many related books, on a single CD-ROM. For single books, however, or even 2-6 small ones, ordinary 1.44 Mbs floppy disks could be used, with their texts reduced to plain TXT and WINzipped, so that about 6 Mbs could be included on it. The spread of floppy disk drives is still larger than that of CD-ROM drives. But the price difference for the blanks does hardly matter any more, so cheap are both.

BRAINSTORMING: Have a brainstorm on the subject, either by yourself only or together with some like-minded friends or associates. I thought about the subject for a long time but will probably have missed quite a few possibilities. In some ways several heads are better than one. This opportunity is almost of the same size as was the invention of writing, that of the printing press and that of the Internet. Compare the memory capacity of a CD-ROM of that of our brains. How much could we learn by heart and easily and rapidly recall?

BROWSING AND SURFING VS. DOWNLOADING & OTHERWISE COMPILING LIBERTARIAN INFORMATION ON CD-ROMS: I know that most anarchist and libertarian surfers did so far prefer to engage in individualized and "anarchistic" browsing on the Internet, following their own nose. But have they considered the dis-economics involved, compared with getting whole small freedom libraries on CD-ROMs? From these they could pick and choose as well, without encountering e.g bugs, broken links, slow uploading speeds and coming across all too much irrelevant information or getting lost or stuck in various link chains, like in a labyrinth. The sequential and linked contents list to 650 Mbs at a time, in one CD-ROM, combined with an alphabetical index (to some extent already available via file management programs, as in Windows Explorer, would make searching much easier and more fruitful. The previously assembled libertarian information, offered on CD-ROMs, could be considered as productive capital or pre-done labour. Consider also: How much other large capital could be offered so cheaply and could be multiplied so easily?

BURNING CD-ROMS: Quite a number of different programs exist by now for burning CD-ROMs. I have still to see an evaluation of all of them. However, if the product does not greatly differ, i.e., all the differently compiled CD-ROMs could still be read on most CD-ROM drives, then it does not greatly matter which program is chosen by the compilers.

BURNERS, PRICES: The cheapest new burner that I have so far seen advertised, I saw in a TV advertisement in June 02. It was down to A $ 128! That is about US $ 65! Before, in Harvey Norman's computer store in Campbelltown, I saw one for $ 149. Some of the burning programs are down to A $ 25.

BUYERS FOR LIBERTARIAN CD-ROMS & ADVANCE ORDERS OR INDICATIONS OF INTEREST: Those only prepared to purchase finish libertarian CD-ROMs should also get themselves listed as future buyers. Advance payments would not be necessary - until the disks are ready to be delivered.

CAPACITY FOR TEXTS SCANNED IN AS IMAGES, WITHOUT OCR: As far as I know, a CD-ROM can be filled with about 30,000 pages that are only scanned in as images. Assuming the average book to contain 250 pages, this would reduce its storage and retrieval capacity to 120 books. Moreover, it would save the labour involved in correcting texts scanned with OCR programs, none of which are perfect as yet. They could also be enlarged on screens, as required and printed out as "images". Scanners are becoming cheaper all the time. A Canon scanner, including OCR was offered here for A$ 100 but it has a low image resolution. To read images of fine print probably the highest affordable resolution would be desirable. Anyhow, that is another easy and powerful option to be considered, for labours of love, undertaken on PCs to make libertarian texts completely and more easily and cheaply accessible. But one should keep in mind that texts scanned in OCR and then proof-read could be offered in much larger quantities and also, in many cases, in more legible typefaces. See under PDF.

CAPACITY, e.g. book publishing. While the blanks offer so far either 650, 700 or 800 Mbs, this capacity could be increased, about fourfold, e.g. via WINZIP applied to files reduced to TXT. Thus a CD-ROM might contain up to ca. 2.6 to 3.2 Gbs, almost half as much as a DVD with unzipped text. - The whole capacity of a CD-ROM does not have to be utilized or utilized optimally. In pdf format it might contain exactly reproduced pages, but only ca. 4,000 to 12,000 (The highest estimate that I have seen, in an advertisement, was 30,000 pages), instead of using the potential for 160,000 to 220,000 pages, according to one product and another reference. Nor is it necessary to fill a CD-ROM with book texts, since the disks are so cheap that they are an economic medium even for 1-3 books only and several times they have been used in this way. This may also be the best way to submit texts toward a CD-ROM that would reproduce many such limited offers and thereby offer the advantages of mutual advertising, amounting here to a small and special freedom library.

CAPACITY: HOW MANY WOULD BE REQUIRED FOR ALL LIBERTARIAN TEXTS? A COMPLETE FREEDOM LIBRARY ON A MERE 300 CD-ROMS? Assuming that all libertarian writings would come to 150,000 book titles or their equivalent in other formats, and that a single CD-ROM might contain the equivalent of 500 books, then 300 CD-ROMs would suffice for your complete freedom library. If you bought all of them then you could probably get them presently for as little as $ 5 each, i.e., for $ 1,500 you could have a complete freedom library - on a single bookshelf! It would even be portable. You might have to add only one or a few every year to keep up with recent freedom writings. The space for your collection would no longer threaten to take over your house. But of all this reference material you might not be able to read in full, in a long and healthy life, more than the equivalent of 10-40 CD-ROM text disks. - I had estimated that as few as 100 to 300 libertarians, all as active as I, with my chosen medium, microfiche, could reproduce all libertarian writings permanently and cheaply in this format. If many more books are offered, instead, on CD-ROM then many less micro-fichers would have to make their contributions towards complete freedom publishing in one or the other alternative medium. But a single libertarian, even if he could "simply" download 650 Mbs of libertarian texts from the Internet, would require, at my downloading speed, ca. 400 hours of hard labour to do so. That may be one reason why no one has as yet offered plain text CD-ROMs filled with libertarian texts only. In autumn 2,000 I was confronted by the decision: Use them or lose them, namely the remaining 100 hours of prepaid connection with my service provider. I used them and netted 157 MBs of information. Much is doubled up, flawed or contains broken links. The lot is spread over several disks, in Adaptec Direct CD format, since I downloaded files separately rather than into file folders and the disks slowed down significantly, in their downloading speed, after about 35 Mbs of separate files, altogether over 14,000. But this experience was very instructive for me. Individuals should not all have to engage separately in such chores and pay connection costs for many hours, seeing that a few could do the labours and pay the connection fees once and then could offer very much combined freedom information upon very cheap CD-ROMs, bug free, in better combined form, without flaws and all too much repetition. I found the downloading labour mind and body numbing already after any 2-4 hour session. Thus this labour should be divided between a small group of interested people and then offered as a labour and cost saving option to other freedom lovers.

CD-ROM EDITIONS, OPTIMALLY FILLED WITH LIBERTARIAN TEXTS: No individual or small group should be expected to do all the jobs associated with such an edition on his or its own. Here international division of labor, Free Trade and mutual aid should be applied. Are there many publishers who publish 200 - 2,000 books at a time? I get my libertarian microfiche filmed and duplicated in batches currently coming to 17 PEACE PLANS issues, containing the text equivalent of 17 - 51 books and my annual output comes to ca. 70 PEACE PLANS issues.

CD-ROM LITERATURE OFFERS: I know of only two collections of relatively modern and general literature on CD-ROMs, one of them called THE LIBRARY OF THE FUTURE. It contains over 5,000 titles, not all of them books and costs in retail about A $ 80. Then there is the conservative Freedom Library offered by LEX REX, see the short list on the CD-ROM project: 160,000 pages offerring 55,000 titles, costing about US $ 90 on one CD-ROM, which I bought, and in print about US $ 11,000. As an example I also bought from Harvey Norman's supercomputer shop, for $ 32.95 a disk containing 4,000 classic works of literature, for Mac & Windows, books by 400 authors from all over the world. Leo Tolstoy, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley and Rudyard Kipling are represented there, not necessarily with their freedom writings. How many more such precedents to you need to stir you into action? - I did also read somewhere that all of the somewhere preserved ancient Greek and Roman writings have been put on one or two CD-ROMs. But they could not help freedom lovers of today very much. - Here one should take into consideration that there do exist not only directories to CD-ROMs but also directories to the directories that list CD-ROMs! I downloaded such a directory to directories. Do you have the time and opportunity to peruse such guides? Perhaps in some of these lists one will already find some libertarian text collections on CD-ROM! If so, why aren't these offers pointed out in the libertarian press? Laissez Faire Books mentioned in its catalog, some time ago, a collection of 5 libertarian floppy disks, offering some alphabetized libertarian information for Apple Systems. Is that offer still made by someone on floppies or CD-ROM and also in Windows? I do not know. Do you? - How many more years will it take libertarians and anarchists to make full use of ALL their alternative media option?

CD-ROM OFFERS FOR LIBERTARIANS SO FAR: I have not yet seen any text-only libertarian CD-ROM offered by anyone. Have you? The only anarchist one appears to be the collected works of Bakunin. Instead, I noticed only 2 multi-media CD-ROMs by a famous leftist and somewhat anarchistic writer, Noam Chomsky. Both were offered expensively (by JURA BOOKS with its low costs plus charges) and contained only the equivalent of one or two books or lectures each - instead of 200 - 2,000 in full texts, without pictures and movie clips. Even THE LIBRARY OF THE FUTURE contains more genuine freedom texts in its single CD-ROM than these 2 "anarchistic" multi-media offers did - but only in plain text. I was not tempted by that "anarchist's" CD-ROM offer at all or by any of his many bound books. However, he seems to have been the first "anarchist" to have made use of this publishing medium. For that I can respect him. - Recently Henry George's books and some lectures and articles have also been offered on 2 CD-ROMs, but not yet all Georgist writings. Also James Hutchings, a left anarchist, offers a single floppy disk, almost filled with unzipped anarchist texts. All together too little too late so far. For an individual Dr. David Hart has done most in this respect by partly filling, in PDF, 4 CD-ROMs with classical liberal material, mostly in French. See the Short List.

CD-ROM PRODUCTION EXPERTS: Those with sufficient time and energy and love for the job, or willingness to do such job for agreed-upon payments, have to be found and listed and then to be contacted by those who want to deal with them. I do not and cannot, at least not yet, offer myself for this purpose - but know that many others could, if they wanted to. If someone wants to offer such services to all those on the list, he or she should be at liberty to do so.

CD-ROM PROJECT: CD-ROM, although computer media and very powerful, have so far been as much neglected by libertarians, as were e.g. microfiche and even floppy disks, when it comes to text reproductions for publishing upon demand.

CD-ROM PROJECT: It should not be perceived as one group or one organization but as many. "It's not a group. It's many groups." … "Hell is a place where everyone is the same. Hell is a place where there can be no surprises. Hell is a place where there is just one idea. Sounds familiar?" - Chad Oliver, "Meanwhile, Back on the Reservation", in ANALOG, April 27, 1981, page 87. - In this respect, the still all too tiny CD-ROM projects list is aiming at providing a special society or free market - made up of many diverse societies and special markets. Finally, when the medium is already widely used, it will just become part of the general market and of the specialized markets on it. Then it would need no further advocacy, no more so than paper and ink or computers or spectacles do now. But so far, like so many other libertarian ideas and projects, this particular one, like the micrographic options and even the floppy disk possibilities for freedom books (up to about 6Mbs, zipped, on one cheap floppy disk!), and numerous other freedom ideas and projects, remain vastly unknown, unappreciated and unused even among people who consider themselves to be radical and consistent libertarians, presumably interested in all their freedom options. When this project has achieved its objective, induced enough libertarians to make use of this opportunity, then it might be transformed into, a common projects list, a common literature for sales list, a common abstracts and reviews listing, a common alphabetical index, a common bibliography, for all libertarians. It might, as such, be continued, on CD-ROMs, DVDs, blue light CD's and or online or on other powerful, easy and affordable media.

CD-ROM PROJECTS LIST AND TELEPHONE BOOKS: The CD-ROM list and its providers and publishers will no more so do the CD-ROM publishing for all those listed than telephone directories providers and telephone companies will do all the telephoning for those listed. It just points out an under-utilized information collection, archiving, communication and duplicating option for freedom lovers. Whatever use they make of it, after they have become sufficiently aware of it, is quite up to them. The list merely aims at initiating and facilitating a wide-spread use of CD-ROMs among libertarians for their kinds of texts.

CD-ROM USAGE & WEBSITE USAGE COMBINED: To the extent that libertarian CD-ROM users would require updates or would want to discuss particular books, authors or topics online, they could still do so via the Internet. Later at least some of their discussions might be cheaply archived and distributed on CD-ROMs. - Howard Olson is preparing a first CD-ROM of this kind. It would be a pity if all these opinion exchanges were, after a few months or years, disappear from the Internet and were no longer recoverable from one archive or the other.

CD-ROMs & MICROFILMS: Essentially, CD-ROMs are just another but very powerful and cheap collection, printing, duplicating or publishing option, with some definite advantages over handwriting and printing on paper and even over microfilm publishing. But the latter, in accuracy of its kind of scanning and speed of its kind of printing duplicates is still leading edge technology. Its savings over print on paper publishing are enormous and can only be beaten by CD-ROM and DVD disks and future still more powerful disks, like the upcoming blue-light CD-ROMs. Conversion to microfiche enabled me to produce 189 times as many pages as I had previously produced on paper.

CD-ROMS & WEBSITES: I believe that a mutual fertilization will occur between them. CD-ROMs will often be largely filled with material from websites. On the other side, many websites will come to include material from CD-ROMs or to refer to material that is only offered on CD-ROMs. It is not a case of "either - or" but one of going towards liberty with all the means available to promote it, in their particular strengths.

CD-ROMS FOR BOOK PUBLISHING: For an individual or a small group it is much harder to publish to compile and publish hundreds to thousands of titles at a time than a single one. That is one of the draw-backs of CD-ROMs. However, now we have not only photocopying machines, scanners, dictating programs, efficient keyboards and word processors, telephones, and post office services but mobile phones, faxes, floppy disks, e-mail, websites and partly filled CD-ROMs to compile the material world-wide, sometimes very fast. There are thousands of millions of readers in the world. If only a small fraction of them became involved with today's publishing options in alternative media … And if only a fraction of all libertarians became so involved with their supposedly favorite writings …

CHAIN REACTION OF IDEAS AND KNOWLEDGE: With all freedom ideas, arguments facts and opinions made readily accessible, at last, the critical mass could be reached. Then a chain reaction could come to take place, sweeping the world, burying the unsound ideas, prejudices, spleens, fallacies, myths etc, with the best facts and arguments for the best ideas. We should try to organize the total mobilization of all that we have to offer, instead of merely "spitting or pissing into a strong wind" or trying to extinguish a roaring bush-fire with a few buckets of water. Nothing against the quality of the water or the buckets. There's just not enough of either. See under IDEAS ARCHIVE, PROJECTS LISTING, DIRECTORIES, LIBERTARIAN ENCYCLOPEDIA.

COLLECTED WORKS EDITIONS ON CD-ROMS: They should be of special interest to libertarian magazines that attempt to popularize the writings of certain libertarian writers. So far this may have been done only for Michael Bakunin and Henry George.

COLLECTED WORKS: They do not, any longer, have to be produced very expensively, in numerous and space consuming volumes. The works of most writers can fit with the works of several other writers, on a single 40 cents blank CD-ROM. A still living writer could every few years or even annually put out an updated edition of the works he has so far produced. Coops or partnerships of them could produce and market such an edition between them, if they or their views are compatible. Moreover, collected works editions do no longer have to suffer the fate of being out of print for all too long or having to wait for a long time after the death of an author to be finally produced, at least once. Unless a writer is as prolific as e.g. Isaac Asimov was, a whole CD-ROM will not be needed to reproduce his works. But it could be used to add much of the criticism and praise that his work has received. Otherwise, the works of many authors could be combined on a single CD-ROM, especially if the text is plain and zipped. Among the collected works that I would like to see on one or several CD-ROMs (those of Bakunin are already published in this way and those of Henry George are prepared for this), are those of Ulrich von Beckerath, Laurance Labadie, Robert LeFevre, Herbert Spencer, Frederic Bastiat, Ludwig von Mises, F. A. Hayek, A.J. Nock, Harper, Rothbard, Auberon Herbert, Leonard E. Read, Proudhon, Benjamin R. Tucker, Lysander Spooner. You pick your own favorites - and work towards their cheap and permanent availability in this format. In division of labor between many of their fans, the chores involved for a contributing individual become manageable in size.

COMMON TOUCH OR UNDERSTANDING OTHER PEOPLE: Whoever has the common touch and really understands other people would be much more suitable than I am to promote the use of CD-ROMs among them, for their favorite writings. Some people are born popularizers, advertisers and publicists, opinion makers or advocates and some are not.

COMPETITION WITH OTHER MEDIA: It will have to efficiently compete with website publishing, offered free of charge, or for a small charge like that by Pulpless.Com and with various other electronic book or tablet projects.

COMPUTER KNOWLEDGE AND SKILLS: While I do not possess enough skills of this type as yet, and may never become as skilled as others in this field, I do know that on the market, among all the libertarian talents, there are many who are able to do this job very efficiently and that among these a few would be willing to do so if they saw that it would open up a new market for their abilities in optimally assembling libertarian texts on CD-ROMs, in the same way as it was opened up for music, games, software, directories and encyclopedias with the arrival and use of CD-ROMs in these spheres.

COMPUTER SKILLS REQUIRED FOR OPTIMALLY COMPILING LIBERTARIAN TEXTS ON A CD-ROM: I haven't as yet acquired the skill to efficiently compile 650 Mbs of texts in a single CD-ROM, although I possess the ADAPTEC Easy CD Creator program. (I used so far only ADAPTEC Direct CD format, which uses a CD-ROM like an ordinary disk drive but doesn't make the disk readable in most other CD-ROM drives.) I do know, though, that there are many libertarians for whom such a compilation would be a relatively easy job. And they could possibly make some money from it. So what is holding up this job?

CONTRIBUTIONS NEED NOT BE SENT IN NOW. On the list only the availability of a certain number of Kbs or Mbs for such publishing efforts should be indicated. While I would welcome some further contributions that I would like for my own reading and collection or also for my limited libertarian microfiche publishing efforts, I for one do not see myself as a suitable recipient and CD-ROM publisher for all the Mbs offers of libertarian information and texts that this list may come to indicate. Among all those listed, I may still be the least skilled on in this respect! Moreover, to use an analogy: One printer or publisher could not serve the printing and publishing requirements of all the world, not even if he used CD-ROMs. Although a single CD-ROM could offer a whole large encyclopaedia or small special library, it, and even hundreds of it, could not reproduce all books and manuscripts in the world. (Only for libertarian writings a few hundred CD-ROMs might suffice.) Moreover, I am not yet skilled enough in compiling and editing CD-ROMs - but know that there are thousands around who are very well informed and capable in this respect, as professionals or hobbyists. Both types should enter themselves in the list for sales of their services or cooperative labors of love, in the pursuit of common interests among those who got themselves listed. - To get in touch with each other and to make their own arrangements and agreements on their kind of libertarian CD-ROM is quite up to them. But they should announce their common project as well as their finished product.

COOPERATION OR COLLABORATION AMONG LIBERTARIANS REQUIRED: While most individuals would have difficulties in digitizing and effectively compiling as much as 650 Mbs on one CD-ROM, a few to a few dozen libertarians could do so relatively easily, e.g. via e-mail attachments (for up to 1 MB) & separate searching and downloading efforts, as well as keyboarding and scanning efforts, with each participant doing one chapter of an agreed upon book title, instead of trying to tackle a whole book by himself. They could also contribute as much from their own already existing files as they want to. In this way they could fill one or even several freedom CD-ROMs relatively fast. How many Mbs have you compiled in your system so far, during your years of computer and IN usage? How many of these Mbs would you like to see published in a common CD-ROM? What are their special subjects? A common listing of these offers could soon lead to the first CD-ROM containing this material.

COPYRIGHTS: Are they an insuperable obstacle to this project? - No, for the first text-only libertarian CD-ROM could be compiled only from material that is not or no longer copyrighted. It could also be partly filled with copyrighted material for which no copyrights are claimed for this CD-ROM edition. Libertarians are already accustomed to placing much libertarian copyrighted information on the internet, where 300 million readers can either freely read it or download from it for their private use. - At least until libertarian literature on CD-ROMs becomes popular, the copyrights holders would not have to be afraid to lose other sales thereby. If they wanted to, they could put a time limit on their consent to having their material placed on libertarian CD-ROMs, or a quantity limit for the duplication of their writings on CD-ROMs. Furthermore, a blocking program could be incorporated that would make it difficult to impossible to privately copy from a CD-ROM containing copyrighted material. Furthermore, they could form a coop with the libertarian CD-ROM producers and share royalties according to their page input. But the best solutions for believers and opponents of copyrights would probably consist, in the long run, for each group to produce and sell its own CD-ROMs, confined to their kind of offers. I for one would welcome it if, in the long run, all essential freedom information were offered without copyrights restriction, even if only in form of abstracts, quotes or reviews, and for ideas best in a LIBERTARIAN IDEAS ARCHIVE. Then the not-copyrighted information would possess a pricing and convenience advantage and thus win out over most of the copyrighted information. I would rather like to see writers and innovators rewarded in dozens to hundreds of other contractual ways than by legal copyrights. At least indirectly they could win, in fame and its advantages, the more often their writings are copied, naturally, only if this is done honestly, and under their name. Compare the commercial use many gold medal winners in sports can make of their Olympic fame. Should they have copyrighted the news of their wins?

COPYRIGHTS: The authors of books, all still copyrighted, but independently of conventional publishers produced by them on a CD-ROM, could either earn some money by selling their CDs very cheaply to a very large readership or, if they have only a limited number of readers, very expensively. They could offer to include comments from readers in the next edition, also reviews obtained in the meantime. They could make their own titles more attractive and more widely known by combining them with many other titles of a similar kind or subject. For those who can already achieve many sales of their separate titles in print on paper, or from online offers, the CD-ROM option will not be very attractive, at least not financially. But on CD-ROMs they could include e.g. their personal appearances, talking about the book or the subject and also interviews and reviews as well as very long bibliographies and alphabetical indexes. What they lose in print sales, they might gain by proper pricing of the CD-ROMs containing their works. And they might find it worthwhile to offer one book or all their works so far, on a CD-ROM and keep it or all of them permanently in print in this format. Possibly a program could be included against copying it or copying it more than once. The widest readership, under present conditions, they might obtain by putting their work, if necessary zipped, on a single floppy. On it, it would probably not last as long as a book printed on good paper would, or a quality CD-ROM, but, such a floppy could probably be easily replaced by an interested reader, ordering another one. And illegal copies made of his digitized work might be considered as free publicity for it. Nowadays a book reaching 500,000 to 1 million impressions, is already considered to be a bestseller. With floppies and CDs it could, potentially, reach hundreds of millions. Even if the author did not get any direct returns from it, he would thus make more of a name for himself and could charge more for personal appearances and for interviews and sponsorships, lecture tours etc. and might be offered attractive jobs or consultancy fees. A CD-ROM that would describe all the alternatives to copyrights earnings has still to be compiled as well.

CORRESPONDENCE ON THE CD-ROM PROJECT: All the correspondence that I had on the CD-ROM project might be compiled and made available on a floppy disk, online or on a website, to the extent that it contains interesting proposals, objections and refutations. I believe that the objections and attempts to refute them should be separately compiled in an alphabetized file.

COST COMPARISONS AND BENCHMARK TESTS FOR ALL ALTERNATIVE MEDIA, NOT JUST FOR COMPUTER SOFTWARE AND HARDWARE: Fair enough comparisions should be made, indicating e.g. cost per duplicated page and other characteristics, preferably in tabulated form, and should be well enough published. I know of no website which provides such a comparison! Some information explosion! See the Prize offered by LMP.

COSTS IN HARDWARE, SOFTWARE, LEARNING PERIODS: Access and maintenance costs for microfilm hardware is much lower than for computer hardware. Users of libertarian CD-ROMs would not even have to have an expensive computer system or be linked to the Internet for most of their libertarian information requirements or only for a short time, for updated information. And that time they might spend in an Internet coffee-shop, or on the system of a friend. Microfilm and CD-ROM technology remain largely unchanged, having reached their optimum level. (Well the speed of reading from and writing on CD-ROMs does go up, and CVDs have been introduced which are about seven times as powerful.) Their hardware is supplied at very competitive prices and does not require frequent updates. Home users can learn to use microfiche reading machines and playback CD-ROM disks within seconds to minutes. They do not require re-learning periods for new software and hardware, either and are safe from most bugs. Nor do they become dependent upon search engines and techniques. Guides to what is available on microfilm, on CD-ROM & on the Internet can also be cheaply published on microfiche, floppies & on CD-ROMs, for any special subject. The attempt to mediate most information exclusively online overlooks that most information, even computer information, is still mediated via printed paper and that microfiche, floppies and CD-ROMs are much more cost efficient than are pages printed on paper - whenever large text compilations are involved.

COSTS OF CD-ROM BLANKS: The re-writable CD-ROM blanks, which was 2 years ago still priced at about $ 30, I have lately seen for $ 5. (June 02: $ 1.) The plain blanks for read and write once CD-ROMs are down to $ 1.25 each, in individual jewel cases, in packs of 10 in shops like Bing Lee. (THE SUN HERALD, Nov. 19^th, 2000, page 46. I have bought smaller batches at A 4 2 each. A recent newspaper article, discussing CD-ROMs for the production of a combined telephone book for all of Australia, on a single CD-ROM, mentioned that they can be produced for as little as 50 cents in costs. (Retail prices of CD-ROM blanks, by June 02, are down to 40 cents.) Newsagents retail the Australian telephone books on CD-ROM for $ 20. How much cheaper do libertarians want their media to be? Do they want to be paid for condescending to make use of floppies, microfiche and CD-ROMs or do they expect a government subsidy for their publishing efforts on as cheap media? The libertarian free marketeers are all supposed to be fans of micro-economics, of free enterprise and free trading under competitive pricing, favoring automation, labour and capital savings. Why aren't they, here? - The presently remaining low costs for CD-ROMs are no real obstacle to most working people in developed countries or even to poor retirees like myself. Most of the better computer systems do already have at least a CD-ROM playback drive, if not also a "burner" for writing on them. The burners are about 3 to 4 times as expensive as the cheap CD-ROM drives. The compiling of a libertarian CD-ROM edition could be undertaken with the cheap CD-ROM disks, at A $ 40cents each. When at least 650 Mbs are so assembled, then they could be best edited on a re-writable CD-ROM, which can be used up to 1,000 times. Once it is sufficiently edited, this could be used as a master to either privately and slowly copy it with a burner, to produce duplicates, or to use the cheap and automated services of a copy bureau like DENTON, whose prices for a duplicate I have seen as low as A $ 1.10, if one ordered several hundred copies at a time. So one could save oneself the labour and time of home-production, using commercial services at a very affordable price, if one does not have the time, energy or patience to produce them at home. Moreover, one would not wear out one's equipment. Many authors would be prepared to pay more for the printing of each copy of a single book. On a CD-ROM a groups of authors or fans could publish a whole small special interest library at such a low price. Moreover, by ordering, on demand, further such small batches, they could keep all these titles on a single CD-ROM permanently "in print". What are they waiting for? And why haven't vanity presses or coops of writers made use of this option yet?

COSTS OF CD-ROM DRIVES: The CD-ROM read-only drives were here down to A $ 136 already two years ago. Even the Read & Rewrite CD-ROM drives, or burners, are here and now down, e.g. for Creative Blaster, CD-RW 8x write, 4x rewrite & 32x read, to A $ 398. (Dick Smith Electronics offer: www.dse.com.au See under BURNERS for much cheaper offers by June 02.

COSTS OF CD-ROMS, MICROFICHE & FLOPPIES: The material costs of CD-ROM reproduction are really negligible. Already with my microfiche I came sometimes down to 0.03 cents per page on one of my microfiche duplicates containing up to 1350 small pages. Floppies can be similarly economical for freedom book reproductions. To fill a microfiche, with their limited unit size, 98 - 1350 pages, in the lower and more common reduction rates, is still quite manageable for an individual, especially when using, for the technical labours (beyond supplying the photo-ready paper master for filming) a good micrographic service bureau. On floppies, with 1.4 MB capacity, and at about the same low price per duplicate as microfiche, an individual can manage to accumulate and offer a similar quantity of text as can be provided on a microfiche, i.e. the equivalent of one or two standard sized books. More when the text is zipped!) At 29 x reduction I usually get 504 pages reproduced, with photocopies of 4 book pages attached to each of 126 foolscap documents. My costs for the original filming of such a libertarian microfiche and the first 100 duplicates of it, all done automatically through a micrographic service bureau, are less than A $ 50. Further batches of 100 duplicates, ordered only if and when required, cost me only A $ 28. The compilation & duplication of a libertarian floppy disks could be done easily and fast enough at home, on demand with the simplest computer systems. They do require a bit more space for storage and cost a bit more in postage than do microfiche and are not as long-lasting. However, both could be easily and cheaply replaced, fast enough for most purposes. The contents of the floppies could even be e-mailed, in attachments of up to 1 MB. If the text of a floppy is zipped, much more than 1 Mb could be e-mailed in a single attachment. Used microfiche reading machine can be acquired for as little as $ 50. Used computer systems usually cost a bit more. - Nevertheless, neither the microfiche publishing nor the floppy disk publishing opportunities are widely used or even appreciated by most libertarians & anarchists. For more on the microfilm options see my website. So what is holding up, as well, the output of cheap and powerful libertarian CD-ROMs? - Just ask yourself: How many individuals or small groups are there - quite ready to write, compile or reproduce a whole small reference library in a single effort? For an individual this job is just too much. Thus collaboration is obviously required and, as obviously, hasn't naturally developed or been organized as yet. Can libertarians and anarchists manage to forget their differences and collaborate to that extent? Supposedly all of us are for full freedom of expression and information rights and liberties and also for more freedom of action opportunities for ourselves. So, when are we going to take up, sufficiently, all these great alternative media opportunities, starting perhaps with CD-ROMs? Relatively few libertarians would have to become active in this way to finish the job of making all libertarian writings cheaply, easily, permanently and fast enough, for most purposes, accessible on alternative media like microfiche, floppy disks and CD-ROMs.

COSTS OF ONLINE READING AND DOWNLOADING: How expensive is reading a whole pro-freedom book online, provided it is already on the Internet? Let us say that it is of average size in pages and print. It would usually take you a few hours to read it, mostly in several sessions. One must further presume that you would find screen reading easy enough. Thus, in provider services and telephone charges it might cost you quite a few dollars. For me, living in the country, about $ 3 are involved per hour. Thus this high technology option might cost as much as a new or second hand printed book (if they were all available to you, fast enough). Moreover, you would end up only with what you could memorize, not with a copy of the book itself, for easy reference. Nor could you annotate the text while reading it online, at least not yet, with most of the present websites. Nor is making and maintaining a book-length website cheap and easy for the publisher or editor. You could download it, but to download as many books as would be required to fill a single CD-ROM might take you, as it would take me, about 400 hours of hard labour on top of the connection and telephone cost. If you were to print the text out, then toner and paper costs as well as wear on your printer would add up, especially if you were to print out 300-500 books, which could be contained on a single CD-ROM. So information offered "free" on line is anything but free of all charges and costs, even if access, downloading and printing-out are all managed by you quite trouble free. - However, as has been rightly pointed out to me, some people are on fixed charges, for unlimited viewing and downloading. Then there are no extra costs for downloading many long texts but only additional labours, especially since most books seem to be broken up into many different files. Programs for downloading a whole website automatically seem to exist but I do not know as yet details on them.

COSTS, RETAIL PRICE OF A LIBERTARIAN CD-ROM: A libertarian CD-ROM containing the texts of 300-500 books could perhaps be profitably retailed for as little as $ 5 and probably for no more than $ 50, with the latter price now being often the price for a single newly printed book. How much more do you want to save in acquiring a large or even complete freedom library?

COSTS: What is cheaper, at present, for the preservation of 650 Mbs of text (or more, if in plain text and zipped) at a time? We should let ourselves be guided here by the experience with CD-ROM use for music, games, software, directories and encyclopaedias.

CUSTOMS, HABITS AND TRADITIONS OF PUBLISHING AND READING: To achieve easy, cheap and comprehensive access to all freedom texts, we should be willing to give up long established and maintained publishing and reading customs, habits & traditions. At least for us the message should be more important than the medium. At the same time, we should be aware that easy, cheap, powerful and long lasting alternative media have, as such, their own message to tell and freedom lovers interested in their freedom of expression and information options should be prepared to listen to it and to ponder it. Reliance on a single or a few conventional or popular media alone, on too few and too expensive or difficult ones, has already lead to many disappointments and is bound to lead to many more. It might postpone our D-Day indefinitely.

DEFINITIONS ENCYCLOPAEDIAS: CD-ROMs have enough space to permit the inclusion of dozens to hundreds of different definitions for every term. Most people remain unaware of the existence of most of the other definitions and just stick with one or a few that they heard about first and that somewhat appealed to them. Awareness of the variety of definitions is bound to make people more careful in their wordings. Perhaps one day the variously interpreted words will be numbered in accordance with their numbering on a comprehensive list of different definitions of the same term. Many dictionaries, for their own purposes, have already given numbers to the different interpretations.

DELPHIC ORACLE, LIBRARY OF ALEXANDRIA, WORLD LIBRARY, WORLD INFORMATION SERVICE. Obviously, we could not afford to offer all freedom writings in print or online, at least not yet, seeing the costs involved with these media. However, we could afford to put all of them on CD-ROMs, DVDs and upcoming blue-light CDs etc. Have we got any valid excuse for not doing this? Putting some articles, essays and books online and maintaining them there is obviously not enough and has not proceeded far enough as yet and may never do so. The same applies to books in print. Already with microfilm complete publishing and library and information services could have been achieved - but the medium remains too unpopular and may remain so for a long time if not forever. The costs for establishing and maintaining very large websites at state of the art can be very high. See under costs. At least the duplicating costs of 650Mbs to 3.2 Gbs of texts on a single CD-ROM are down to a short copy period, a bit of electricity and a 50 cents blank, which could be air-mailed world-wide for less than the price of most printed books. By all means, if you can, establish an electronic world library but, at least at this stage, rather than offering only the downloading of one or a few texts from it, develop it to the stage where a large combination of libertarian files, filling a CD-ROM, can be assembled from such an electronic library, automatically and then printed out on a CD-ROM and sent cheaply and fast enough by snail mail. One should be able to wait for reading matter that will one will take hundreds to thousands of hours or days to read. Instant or access within minutes is only desirable for short texts or single books - to the extent that the latter are already on line. So far only a fraction of all freedom books is. Not even a complete list of all the online libertarian books seems to have been provided there so far. Please correct me, if I am wrong.

DIFFERENT KINDS OF LIBERTARIAN TEXT COMPILATIONS ON CD-ROMS: None of those listed would be under any obligation to get their material included with particular other material that they do dislike. They should push for their own kind of assortment of libertarian texts among like-minded people on or off this list.

DIFFICULTIES: The greatest difficulty with assembling libertarian texts on CD-ROMs seems to exist for individuals or small groups in assembling 650 Mbs at a time to fill one. But then they would not be forced to fill a CD-ROM on their first attempt. They could partly fill it and invite others to add their material to it, later, for the second and following editions.

DIGITIZING AND SPREADING OF ALL FREEDOM TEXTS: That all freedom texts ought to become digitized, as soon as possible, is already largely agreed upon. But on whether all of them could or should be offered online or on CDs, or on both, cross-referenced, is still an unsettled question. So far the CD-option, in spite of its considerable size, cost and other advantages, has been vastly underutilized. Whether in full and free competition with each other, one or the other form will come to predominate is not yet determined. So far online use is much ahead, but that could change if the CD-ROM alternative is sufficiently considered and used. Compare how much CDs do already predominate in music, software, games, encyclopaedias and directories. Other electronic book options are still in flux, with none of them having become very popular. The publishers and readers of the future will decide the question, hopefully much better informed than they are now. - For liberty lovers it should be self-evident that both of these media should be fully utilized in their strengths and freely compete with each other and with all other alternative media. Only then will we come to realize the advantages and disadvantages of them and make fully informed and rational choice of them. - I believe that they will come to supplement each other, very effectively, but this remains to be seen. Furthermore, I hold that we cannot afford to ignore the CD-ROM options any more than we can afford to ignore the online options. Event he humble and supposedly outdated 1.44 Mbs floppy disk, if used for zipped texts, can carry about 6 Mbs of text, i.e., one large to several small books. Moreover, automatic production of CD-ROMs, on demand, offering 650 - 800 Mbs or, zippped, ca. 2.6 to 3.2 Gbs texts, would have considerable advantages over each reader searching for and downloading as much information on his own and thousands to ten-thousands of other readers doing the same. - A comprehensive libertarian electronic library, offering on CD-ROM duplicates any wanted libertarian texts, would have great advantages over downloading numerous reference texts even at the highest present downloading speeds. One does not need most texts any faster than one has time and energy to read them. Access to short texts or single books, immediately wanted, could still be online. But for a whole special freedom library via air-mail one might have to wait all of 10 days! For them electronic transmission speed is not essential.

DIRECTORIES: Like nation-wide telephone directories, now usually available on a single CD-ROM, instead of on dozens to hundreds of printed volumes, directories to all libertarians, world-wide, that want to be listed and can afford to be listed as such, could also most economically offered on one or a few CD-ROMs and annually updated, with in-between updates being available on a website.

DIRECTORY OF LIBERTARIANS ACCORDING TO THEIR SPECIAL INTERESTS: If such a directory did already exist then this special list for those interested in the CD-ROM options would probably be superfluous as well.

DIRECTORY, LIBERTARIAN: At number of libertarian directories has already been started on the Web, one with direct e-mail links to libertarian scholars. But if all the more different libertarian interest addresses, electronic and otherwise would be included, then a website would become almost unmanageably large. Like with local and even continental phone books, a more economical alternative would be a CD-ROM edition, annually replaced and supplemented by a website that brought nothing but changes since the last edition. I for one would want to include all anarchists as well, and in general all freedom lovers who would want to be listed in it, at least with one of their e-mail addresses. Name and address alone would mostly not be sufficiently informative. Affiliations and special interests should be mentioned as well, naturally only on a voluntary basis. By now one e-mail address would be almost obligatory.

DISECONOMICS OF SEPARATE SEARCH & DOWNLOADING EFFORTS AND CONNECTION CHARGES FOR MANY LIBERTARIANS, WHO ARE, LARGELY, INTERESTED IN THE SAME KINDS OF TEXTS: Assume that it is a popular title and that you as well as ten-thousand other people download it into your system. Then how much do you and ten-thousand others spend altogether, in searching and downloading labour time and in connection fees, in order for each of you getting it on your separate and private disk drives? Imagine the time, labour and fee savings if, instead, that title and 300-500 others, were compiled by a few collaborators on a single CD-ROM and sold to them cheaply by mail? Why should thousands to ten-thousands of freedom lovers have to look up and download largely the same material separately, rather than using division of labour? A few of us could be downloading almost all the freedom information that is already offered on the Internet (that of some lasting value). These few could add to this information as much as they like and could, from other and private sources, and then offer their compilation on CD-ROM to all who are interested and do want to save themselves labours, costs and troubles. Should freedom lovers waste their spare time and funds unnecessarily just on acquiring texts, with the supposedly the highest technology, without considering possible further cost and labour savings? - If each libertarian separately downloads and fills his own libertarian CD-ROM then this is rather uneconomic compared with each buying, very cheaply, largely the same information on a single CD-ROM, compiled for all other libertarians by a few libertarians, and perhaps all libertarian information offered there and elsewhere, on only a few CD-ROMs.. - According to a recent experience I would have needed 400 hours to download enough libertarian information from the Internet to fill a CD-ROM. Apart from the chore involved, this would have cost me ca. $ 1200 in connection fees. And yet a group could have compiled this information for me on a duplicated CD-ROM, costing the group, once the information is digitized and edited, only 40 cents ( in A $!) for the blank to run a duplicate off, on a private PC. Commercial duplicators could run off several CD duplicates at the same time. At the costs of the label, packing and mailing and these material costs still remain low. They could have sold an as cheap duplicate profitably for about $ 5-50 and I would have felt that I would have got a bargain with it even at $ 50. (Especially if the scanning and proof reading is not done by paid professionals but by libertarians, as a labor of love, for their favorite texts.) - How much would 650 Mbs printed, i.e., ca. 300-500 libertarian books, cost me now in print, paper, binding, postage and handling? Aren't such possible savings obvious enough? If the particular libertarian texts, that I want, were spread over 10 or more CD-ROMs then this would hardly matter, either, especially if one libertarian CD-ROM could guide me to the contents of all the others and all libertarian texts might be reproduced on as few as 300 CD-ROMs, i.e., might also be affordable, for many libertarians, for their private reference library. - So far, libertarians view largely the same information again and again, reading it either online, or downloading it from the website. See the often large figures on visitors to a site! For book reproductions there we should not be proud of large numbers of visitors being registered but ashamed to waste the time and money of so many when we could serve them so much better with CD-ROMs. What a waste of our money and energies! To the extent that freedom lovers want to acquire largely the same pro-freedom information, they could do so most economically by getting it on CD-ROMs, produced for them by a few other freedom lovers. They should also consider that in their individual searches, using less than perfect browsers (and at a time when not all libertarian sites are interconnected as yet) and with their own downloading efforts, they might miss many libertarian sites that might be of great interest to them. On libertarian CD-ROMs all libertarian sites could all be "fished out" from the Internet ocean and then very cheaply offered for sale, ideally by the website providers themselves, by a group of patient and skilled searchers doing this job for all of us. See also under: INTERNET, WEB, ONLINE, DOWNLOADING.

DISPERSED INFORMATION THAT HAS TO BE LABORIOUSLY COLLECTED FROM THE INTERNET AND OTHER MEDIA: Archival collections can be reproduced, at ridiculously low material costs, so far only on CD-ROMs, which are even cheaper for large quantities of information than are microfilms.

DISTRIBUTION METHODS: The independent producers of different libertarian CD-ROMs might agree upon different distribution methods but one should expect that they would not mind being listed in a common list for all such products.

DISTRIBUTION OF INFORMATION: Is it sufficiently comprehensive and automated already on the Internet, especially for libertarian and anarchist information? Obviously, only a fraction of the websites makes so far money for their providers or at least covers their costs. It is true, that one does not have to worry about distribution there, if one permits online reading and downloading and copying. One can also get some satisfaction from getting the number of accesses to one's pages recorded there. On the other hand, one's site might never be found or accessed by those who might be interested in it. The chance that it will be found and somewhat perused, if not studied, is much larger, is it is part of a whole special library that is offered on a CD-ROM. Moreover, The number of people who can access a CD-ROM, but are not connected to the Internet, is probably larger than the number of those who are on the Internet. - Add to that the human hoarding instinct, that lead to many personal reference libraries, some of them so large that they reduce living space. CD-ROMs (linked to updating sites) could satisfy this instinct and free-up living space. On the latter aspect, I have already observed second-hand printed encyclopedias being very cheaply on sale in second-hand bookshops and my own grandchildren rarely if ever referring to the printed editions. In music and games CD-ROMs have already taken over. Regarding software the issue is still in doubt - but, anyhow, computer magazines continue to offer 1-3 CD-ROMs as freebees with their printed magazines. - Most people have the wrong impression that distribution from the Internet is free. This is true for those who have already paid for unlimited access or whose Internet service account is paid for, mostly (apart from some personal e-mail accounts) by others, as it is for many academics, researchers and professionals, for whom their employer pays these costs. For others considerable costs are involved for their connection costs, coming roughly to the costs of a printed book or two per month. - Moreover, for their readers, in many to most cases, reading online or downloading and screen reading offline, are associated with considerable costs. The search and downloading costs as well as the reading costs could be greatly reduced by offering whole special reference libraries on CD-ROM, as cheaply as is possible with this medium. - How long would it take you to download Encyclopedia Britannica from the Internet? Would you not rather buy it on a $ 100 CD-ROM? Admittedly, on the Internet it offers additional search and reference options and links. - If one wants to make some money from one's writings, then selling them on CD-ROM, in combination with other such offers, seems to be an attractive option and the chores involved could be delegated, for a fee, to some suitable agency.

DISTRIBUTION OPTIONS FOR THE FINISHED LIBERTARIAN CD-ROMs. Which ones will be used by different compilers for their disks, will differ. But an attempt might be made to list all or at least many of the options. - A particular disk, compiled by a particular group, might provide a copy to each of them and then permit them and even invite them to reproduce and give away or sell duplicates made by them as they please, with the intention to spread freedom ideas as widely and rapidly as possible, not to make merely a financial profit. We would all gain indirectly if freedom ideas became widely spread. - Contributors to a disk might appoint one of them or an agency to duplicate their CD and to sell these duplicates, just sending the group of authors a percentage from all sales made. - As an advertisement stunt for the CD-ROM as a libertarian publishing and reading medium, the contents of one such CD-ROM, optimally filled, might be put on a very large website and then people who would be interested not only in some of the contents but all of it, should be invited to provide some feedback on how much it had cost them in labor and connection fees, to download the whole contents and then to compare these expenses with ordering the CD, waiting for it and paying its price. Even that would not be a quite fair comparison to the CD-ROM offer, since on it all these sites would have been already collected and effectively combined, a job which someone searching for the same files on the Internet, and then downloading and combining them at home, would have to undertake for himself, at his expense. Moreover, all troubles with various files, in these attempts, would be on his own shoulders. For the files on a CD-ROM these troubles would be undertaken by one person or a small group - for many other people, the buyers of the disk. - If CDs of this kind do contain copyrighted material, this could be so indicated, as it is on the Internet and copyrights advocates could reproduce their own disks, all with copyrighted material only, probably at a higher price than those containing not copyrighted material. They could also make different decisions on how any profits might be distributed among their members. That would be their problem. Seeing that so many copyrighted books could be offered on a single CD-ROM, that disk would either have to be sold very expensively or the share in the profit for each of the published authors of such a disk would be very small per disk sold. Let free enterprise competition and consumer sovereignty decide upon future text publishing and reading.

DIVERSITY OF FREEDOM INTERESTS: Indeed, even our freedom interests and priorities are not identical, in detail, but the few CD-ROMs that would be required to provide all the unchanging classical and specialized freedom texts, could cater to all our special interests, like any other complete and conventional library could, if it were already established and if it were situated near us. Any special kind of libertarian interest could be expressed in one or on a few CD-ROMs, which could be separately listed and ordered - once all libertarian information is so compiled and made available in cheap CD-ROM duplicates.

DIVISION OF LABOR AND THE CD-ROM PROJECT: "… it's possible to complete very large projects by taking a succession of small, relatively painless steps. … while many big jobs can be tackled one step at a time, sometimes it's better to take two steps at a time. Or even more." - Stanley Schmidt in editorial, ANALOG, March 30^th, 1981. Between us we have the capacity and should have the will to provide, cheaply and soon, all freedom texts for ourselves and for anyone else who should become interested in them.

DIVISION OF LABOUR AMONG LIBERTARIANS FOR DIGITIZING TEXTS BY KEYBOARDING OR SCANNING: If the texts are not already digitized, as the few freedom books and all other texts on the Internet are - from where they could be, rather laboriously, expensively and time-consumingly downloaded, to fill a CD-ROM (taking for this about 400 hours with my 2 year old system (a Pentium II, 450 Mhz, with a 56 Modem, and at my personal operating speed) then division of labour for keyboarding or scanning-in & correcting the scanned books, could be arranged for each book title. Only thus could an individual's text contribution effort be made quite bearable for him. In practice, one website or e-mail address could offer a list which would publish proposals to digitize certain books and invite help with these jobs. Each proponent could give an e-mail address and state that he would do at least e.g. one tenths of the job involved with one book - once another ten would name themselves as helpers for the title he had proposed. The potential helpers would be listed with their e-mail address as well and once enough are listed the project could proceed rather fast. Possibly advance orders for the digitized book, on floppy or e-mail, could be placed with the convenor, as a further encouragement to go ahead with the digitizing of a particular freedom book. And groups of compilers could combine to offer all their texts on a single CD-ROM. There are many ways to use this freedom option.. The list on the CD-ROM project is intended to promote such collaboration, without forcing anyone into becoming a member of an existing organization and compliance with its rules. Those listed can group and organize themselves, or ignore each other as much as they like. Between them, in a market-like cooperation, they could cover this field.

DIVISION OF LABOUR TO FILL LIBERTARIAN CD-ROMS: To fill them some division of labour will have to be arranged but that should not be too difficult for ideologues of the division of labour, free markets, free trade, free enterprise, private initiative and fully free competition, using all available and suitable resources and machines and channels. - Libertarians supposedly subscribe to e.g. division of labour rather than self-sufficiency. They believe in international cooperation and free trade. They should fully apply these and others of their convictions to their text reproductions and acquisitions as well, using either of the affordable and efficient alternative media. Among these CD-ROMs are outstanding, at least in their capacity and cost savings. Indeed, their capacity is so large that filling them will require considerable collaboration among libertarians, as would the production of 200-2,000 conventional books at a time. Why should numerous libertarians and anarchists have to separately search for and download xyz pages, rather than a few libertarian surveying and downloading the lot and offering them on a few CD-ROM? Since when are e.g. the free market libertarians against cost and labour savings? I do hope that you will not adopt the following stand: Rather leave most libertarian writings unpublished, out of print, in one language only or priced out of reach of all too many, or accessible only with considerable costs and labours, than resort to a change in publishing and reading habits! - Between us we have the information, skills, labor power, interest and patience, time and energy to tackle this project to its conclusion. Between us we have the ideas and solutions for most or the remaining problems of out times but we have not yet comprehensively and widely offered them as blueprints, cheaply, permanently, to almost everyone, in all major languages. With CD-ROMs we could, but, naturally, we should not confine ourselves only to them, or to microfiche or to any other medium but should utilize all of them in their strength. - No one should be expected to participate beyond his interests, energy, time and capacity. But these could be mobilized with this medium especially for the particular freedom texts that one likes most. And the labors involved could come to be shared with many like-interested people - although these people might never meet in person but, perhaps, only through e-mail or snail mail. - A comprehensive list of people interested in this project could get enough groups going, made up of those listed, to produce, rather soon, the first and later many more cooperatively compiled libertarian CD-ROMs, until the field is covered. Long before that this list, as such, would have made itself superfluous. But it might be continued as a literature list for the libertarian CDs offered or as a list of current libertarian projects.

DOWNLOADERS, SCANNERS, KEYBOARDERS & COMPILERS & CONTRIBUTORS OF PRIVATE FILES: Some groups might concentrate merely on downloading everything already digitized and available for this project on the Internet or to induce the website authors and providers to collaborate. Other groups might concentrate on digitizing the numerous freedom texts not yet available on the Internet & in other affordable alternative media. Others might concentrate on writing on their PCs and including their own writings and comments. Others should offer their services as compilers and editors of libertarian CD-ROMs. Others might do some quantity burning of them, once one such edition is finished. All should notify one-agreed upon address of what they have already to offer or have in the works. There they could and should also ask for collaboration, of the kind that they would welcome.

DOWNLOADING LABOURS & COSTS STILL TOO HIGH & TIME CONSUMING. MOREOVER, THEY DO NOT AS YET EASILY REACH ALL FREEDOM INFORMATION THAT IS ALREADY ON THE INTERNET: In autumn 2000 I just had ca. 100 Internet connection hours left with my service provider and only about a month to use them or lose them. So I used them, with numerous breaks in-between, swearing at lost or slow connections, skipping them and the to me less interesting material, merely downloading material, as fast as I could, rather than reading it. Prolonged downloading, I found out, can also be a considerable chore & keyboarding muscle strain. I would hate to have to do that as a paid job for 8 hours straight every day. I downloaded, when possible, mostly in html, since that required less keystrokes, and left the job of reading, selection and editing for possible inclusion in LMP microfiche for later. The drawback with this was that I had to wait for the downloading of many pictures that I was not interested in. Trying to get only the text separately was often too difficult or time consuming or impossible. Result of that effort: On the one hand: The pleasure of a few unexpected "discoveries" that were of great interest to me. The total of texts thus saved in 100 hours was ca. 14,000 files (many sites offer multiple files) coming to 157 Mbs. (In plain texts the downloading would have gone faster but I would have to find and download many more plain text files to fill a single CD-ROM.) I used up my otherwise forfeited connection time and gained many libertarian Mbs for it, some of which could be used to fill future LMP microfiche. On the other hand, and, please, do ponder this fact, to fill a single CD-ROM with 650 Mbs I would have had to spend ca. 400 hours of such labours and their associated costs - assuming that there are already enough freedom websites on the Internet to fill a single freedom CD-ROM or even several. If I could fill 10 libertarian CD-ROMs from that source, it would have taken me ca. 4,000 hours! I shudder at the thought! No wonder, no one seems to have made such a compilation so far and offers it on the market. After that one month of effort I was a new convert: DOWNLOADING SEPARATELY AND INDIVIDUALLY MANY LIBERTARIAN FILES WASTES TIME, LABOUR & CONNECTION FEES! Has anyone as yet undertaken that labour or were all deterred by it? This experience gave me an appreciation of the power of CD-ROMs and the disadvantages of extensive text downloading from the Internet. - Numerous websites are incomplete and faulty. (My own plain LMP site, a first effort, had recently also developed some broken links, which my own and very limited digital skills were unable to repair. A European friend did this for me - and then his website crashed and his connection with his provider, supposedly due to a virus.)

DOWNLOADING LIBERTARIAN INFORMATION: How many MBs of libertarian information do you download p.a.? How much does that cost you in telephone and connection fees? Consider the CD-ROM alternative, and that of floppies and microfiche. By all means, use the Internet - for what it is best. Other media for what they are best in! - Are texts online the optimal and most economical way to offer and receive them? Some texts - yes! All texts - no!

DOWNLOADING SPEEDS AND TIME & COSTS: If there were on the Internet any single libertarian site offering the automatic downloading of 650 Mbs at a time, how much downloading time would it required for most present PC systems? How much would that cost a downloader altogether? I do not know. You tell me! Why should each libertarian have to spend as much in connection fees, when as much could be easily and fast enough, for most purposes, offered on a single CD-ROM, air mailed? Shouldn't most libertarians be able to recognize the waste involved? True, if you only want to view and download a few pages, quite the latest ones, online access is optimal. But for freedom books, of which so far only all too few are offered on-line, this access is not yet optimal. Admittedly, scanning and downloading speeds are increasing and may one day, one year, one decade, make the online compilation of a complete freedom library, as well as the downloading from it, easy and cheap. But we are not there yet. In the meantime there is traffic congestion on the Internet and we slow down each other by excess online use that could be avoided by optimal CD-ROM use.

DOWNLOADING TIP: If you download many separate files separately (instead of putting many of them together into file folders), onto a CDROM, in ADAPTEC disk format, then you will find that after about 35 - 40 Mbs the downloading slows down considerably. You will be up to its optimal speed again only once you start a new disk. They are cheap enough to do so. I bought mine in retail for only A $ 2 each. (Prices for the cheapest, by June 02, are down to A $ 39 cents.) A final, published and integrated libertarian CD-ROM will probably combine batches of different file folders and thus speed up the process of accessing them. It seems that the directory to a disk, in most programs, has only so many entry options for separate files or file folders.

DOWNLOADING TROUBLES FOR INDIVIDUALS: How many hours of my recent 100 hours of searching and downloading were wasted, from my point of view, by the downloading of illustrations, by broken links, stuck websites, obtrusive advertising and mistakes on my side? How many of them were spent on still all too incomplete directories, links and literature lists? I also found numerous scanning or typing mistakes, which more collaboration in website or CD-ROM compilation could have avoided. Many but not enough sites offer text-only versions, as well, which usually download much faster. I do wish that most or all would also offer the option for downloading the whole website in a single effort, instead of in many and boring separate steps. Moreover, I wish that a single and comprehensive libertarian links list would lead me with certainty to all libertarian sites - and back to the list again. The back button did not always lead back. Often I got stuck and had to go back to the beginnings and trace my course again, through something that was still too close to a labyrinth. Moreover, with already more than 60,000 viruses or vandals active on the Internet and viruses transmittable through websites as well, not only through e-mail, the risk of large individual downloading efforts is considerable. Even professional defences against new kinds of such aggressions do always lag somewhat behind. For texts gathered on a master CD-ROM the defence measures could be comprehensive and once the duplicates are laser-burned into CD-ROMs, they are immune to further attacks. Re-writable disks would not be.

DVDs: Once all libertarian texts are already digitized and available on floppies, CD-ROMs or online, they could, perhaps, be offered on as few as 40 - 50 DVDs, assuming that 300 CD-ROMs would suffice for all libertarian writings. To fill the first libertarian DVD with Gbs of libertarian information would, obviously, require much more collaboration between libertarians than does the filling of a CD-ROM with libertarian texts. Moreover, drives for them are not yet as wide-spread as are CD-ROM drives and less is known on their durability. You would lose much more in information if one of their formats were discontinued of if one of the disks were damaged. The prices for these disks and their burners have also come done very much. For the time being, I believe that 650 - 800 Mbs cheap to quality CD-ROMs are good and powerful enough for us to be used extensively. Conversion into later and better disks would be possible.

ECONOMICS, COST & LABOUR SAVINGS BY OFFERING LONG LIBERTARIAN TEXTS OF LASTING VALUE ON CD-ROMs: Would YOU rather spend 400 hours searching on and downloading from the internet to compile 650 Mbs of freedom information, than buying a single freedom text CD-ROM from a supplier somewhere in the world? It might cost you only $ 5-50, including air mail, if the compilation and supply of such disks becomes competitive. Blanks and their duplication, when produced in quantities, are down to A $ 50 cents. Our numerous, separate downloading efforts for information, that is largely identical or related, like all freedom information, is rather wasteful of time, energy and labour. This waste is comparable to a situation in which both printing and photocopying have been invented but printing is not used. Instead, every reader has to laboriously, and expensively photocopy each book that he wants from a single copy in a library. Or would you rather wait another unknown number of years or decades until all freedom information is offered on the Internet and can be downloaded from there in any desired batches within seconds, at almost zero costs? Complete libertarian text access can already be achieved now, with present technologies, at very affordable prices.

EDITING AND COMPUTER SKILLS: If enough libertarian MB offers for this project are soon compiled, then it is only a question of finding libertarians able and willing to edit them into the first cooperatively compiled and integrated text-only libertarian CD-ROM, using its maximum potential, via OCR scanned and proofread texts that are also zipped. I for one would not grant anyone or any group an exclusive franchise but would rather suggest an "open cooperative" (see the writings of Theodor Hertzka on this) for this purpose, one that would reward each participant according to their labour and capital (here: or quantity of text) input. With this medium, too, and for on-demand production only, hardly any finance capital input would be required. Moreover, there are many texts that are not or no longer copyrighted or for which the copyrights holders, like for websites, would make copyrights claims only e.g. for the commercial duplication of printed texts.

EDITING JOB FOR THE FIRST LIBERTARIAN TEXT-ONLY CD-ROM & OTHER POSSIBLE COLLABORATIONS: Optimally arranging all this material on one or several CD-ROMs would require many more skills than I have and am likely to acquire soon enough. But many libertarians do already possess this skill & knowledge and might be willing to apply it to this job. Please suggest yourself or some of your associates for this job. Here, too, some division of labour would be advisable. A group of compilers & editors could easily collaborate via e-mail. An integrated collection of freedom websites on CD-ROMs could save much duplication of lists and links and texts & could combine the efforts of many searches & searchers. Each participating publisher of a libertarian CD-ROM could also add many libertarian, private and digitized files for which he wants publicity. The aim of a comprehensive freedom library on CD-ROM could lead to workshops which, between their members, keyboard or scan in more freedom books, perhaps adding their comments, for one or the other of the next libertarian CD-ROM editions. Obviously, the keyboarding, scanning and correction labours for a single book, to become digitized, is still a major job. But this job could be shared between a dozen or more people, all favoring a particular book not yet so accessible. The initiator could state, e.g. in an annual libertarian CD-ROM, issued as a "libertarian year book": I do intend to include title x in the next edition - but need help to do so without it becoming too much of a chore for me or any participant. The whole book proposed, or chapters of it, could be shared via photocopies, with those who do not possess a copy of it. The initial appeal could contain an abstract of the book and a review by the one proposing it for scanning. - Surely, at least a dozen freedom lovers and computer fans could be found who would be interested in any single good freedom book? Between them they could also share the labours of acquiring permissions for copyrighted texts.

EDITORSHIP OF LIBERTARIAN CD-ROMs: These powerful alternative media deserve better computer and editorial skills than I could provide, at least at this stage. Anyhow, no one can do all such labors for all others, not even when using this powerful technology.

ELECTRONIC PUBLISHING: So many computer users and writers on computers seem to assume that CD-ROM publishing is not part and parcel of electronic publishing. That only online efforts are to be counted or could be effective. But they do not propose that e.g., all music, games, software, directories and encyclopaedias are to be published only online. Since most libertarians want to publish and spread only relatively short texts electronically and this is their only contribution towards complete libertarian publishing, library and information services, I can understand that they are satisfied with that option. But when it comes to thousands of Mbs or Gbs of libertarian publishing, and finally to complete, lasting and secure libertarian publishing, at very affordable prices and with minimal labor and connection costs in accessing large quantities of such knowledge, then, obviously, websites are not yet optimal for most people. That seems hard to understand for many academics, whose connection costs, at high speed, are covered by the universities. I have still to see a fair and complete survey of all the electronic publishing and reading options and one that includes unbiased benchmark comparisons with all other media.

ENTRIES REQUIRED OR SOMEWHAT HELPFUL: Name or cover name, e-mail contact, website, type of material already digitized and available for this project, its estimated quantity in Kbs or Mbs. (Such figures would vary, for the same texts, according to the format used.) Optional entries could be: snail mail address, FAX and Tel. number. Some might not want to give their e-mail address, either, since that might lead to still more junk mail for them. But they should leave some way or the other to contact them, E.g via their website or postal box number. Moreover, they should be induced to send information on changes of their addresses, since e-mail addresses seem to change even faster than snail mail addresses do and much of the hoped-for collaboration will have to take place by e-mailing, if not by sending floppies or partly filled CD-ROMs through the Post Offices.

EXISTING MARKET FOR FREEDOM TEXTS: What percentage of all freedom books do you find now available. in full text, online, or in your nearest large bookshop or library or in your own private library? How often did you have to omit purchasing new freedom books because you could not afford their prices? What percentage of all freedom books are already offered in one or the other of the cheap alternative media - but with the facts about this remaining largely unknown? I do not know of a single collection of freedom books only, on any text-only CD-ROM. Do you? To me that is too glaring an omission, one so scandalous and shameful for supposed students, scholars and lovers of liberty, than I cannot bear remaining silent on this.

FEEDBACK ON SCANNERS & SCANNING PROGRAMS, LOCATION OF SCARCE TEXTS, BURNERS AND BURNING SOFTWARE: All such information would also be helpful to many who will enter their names to the list of the CD-ROM project.

FILLING THE FIRST AND TEXT-ONLY LIBERTARIAN CD-ROMs WITH ALREADY DIGITIZED TEXTS, COMING TO 650 Mbs, IS THE ONLY REMAINING MAJOR "PROBLEM". I on my own can neither gather as many libertarian digitized texts nor arrange them optimally on one CD-ROM. I would rather have more skilled and as interested people undertake this job, in partnership with others or in mutual aid or collaboration agreements. Furthermore, I am and will remain almost fully engaged with my Libertarian Microfiche Publishing pilot scheme for the next 5 years. Nevertheless, I would like to promote, as little or much as I can, the idea of this freedom of expression and information opportunity as well and awareness of the necessity for considerable libertarian collaboration for it, while going on being busy with my LMP efforts, at least until I have reached 2,000 Peace Plans issues on 2,000 microfiche. (That means there are now only 232 to go. I might reach that aim in 3-4 years - and even then you might still go on ignoring that opportunity for yourself as you have ignored your floppy disk and CD-ROM publishing options.)

FINANCE: An individual could finance such publishing efforts. I do live in relative poverty but have subsidized my LIBERTARIAN MICROFICHE PUBLISHING for 20 years out of my small income and would be willing to pay for the pressing of the first few hundred copies of the first collaboratively and text-only libertarian CD-ROM, optimally filled, taking my share in duplicates of this CD-ROM. But most computer buffs could cover the initial small material and service outlays themselves, speculating that they could recover them fast by selling a few of the finished CD-ROMs. Some time ago & with one Australian firm, the charge for commercial CD-ROM duplication was as low as A $ 1.10 per pressed CD-ROM, in batches of a few hundred. The most recent hint I received on the production costs of pressing CD-ROM duplicates indicated 50 cents. Computer magazines find them so cheap that they attach often not just one but up to 3 of them, as give-aways.

FIRST EDITION OF A TEXT ONLY LIBERTARIAN CD-ROMS & THE VARIOUS SPECIAL INDIVIDUAL FREEDOM INTERESTS: While a first cooperatively compiled pro-freedom CD-ROM might not contain ONLY material that is of highest interest to you, you could, most likely, find much of interest to you there. And nothing would hinder you and like-minded people to compile and produce still more specialized pro-freedom CD-ROMs. The first 2 libertarian yearbooks, in the early seventies, could not, like most other freedom books, bring much or all new freedom information but they still do make for SOME interesting reading now. That is why I microfiched them. On a first and text-only CD-ROM about 500 times as much information could be offered. Thus a libertarian CD-ROM, more so than a newspaper, and almost like a libertarian encyclopaedia, could cater, somewhat, to almost all special libertarian interests. Inevitably, further specialization would follow, with further editions, until finally all texts are made thus accessible.

FIRST EDITION OF A TEXT-ONLY LIBERTARIAN CD-ROM - A SUGGESTION FOR ITS COMPILATION: Somewhat decorated, illustrated, coloured sites, movie clips and other fancy designs should not be automatically excluded now or in the future. Here, too, the customers could be offered what they want, at least in the long run. However, for the first libertarian CD-ROM, I would prefer a higher information density via text-only writings. Moreover, to popularize this publishing and reading alternative, the first text-only CD-ROM should represent as wide a spectrum of freedom ideas as possible. By all means, do provide, in future, and order only CD-ROMs that are as decorative as you like them. I hold that with the multimedia format the advantage of offering libertarian texts on CD-ROM, as against on websites only, can almost disappear, since then, as with music CD-ROMs, only relatively little text could be offered on them. What is more important for the movement: easy and fast enough access to all of the texts or the decorated presentation of all too few of them?

FIRST EDITION TO COVER MUCH OF THE FREEDOM SPECTRUM: Obviously, the first compilation should gather in as much of the whole freedom spectrum as possible, rather than favoring any special freedom interests only. It should not only reproduce many varied libertarian texts but be also a handbook or yearbook on the libertarian movement. Let me know how many Mbs, roughly estimated and what kind of freedom information you are able and willing to offer to this project. I will continue to list the accumulating the total and the kind of freedom Mbs offered and will invite anyone interested and able to combine all these offers in the first single libertarian CD-ROM or, if as much information is soon offered, in a few libertarian CD-ROMs. I would rather have someone else undertake this first organizing effort as well! The opportunity is there - will you use it?

FIRST JUST ONE LIBERTARIAN CD-ROM. LATER PERHAPS 300 OF THEM. Would more than 300 be needed? After the first libertarian CD-ROM has appeared, several different ones might follow soon, e.g. one for upholders of copyrights and a separate one for not or no longer copyrighted texts. The propertarians or anarcho- capitalists, the limited government advocates and the left or anti-property anarchists, likewise, might want to sort their texts out and offer them on different CD-ROMs. Then, and between them, the attempt could and should be made to offer ALL freedom writings (all those of some lasting value) on CD-ROMs. Perhaps no more than 300 CD-ROMs might be required for this, presuming the existence of 150,000 libertarian books, or their page equivalents of other writings of some lasting value. Please, do compile a libertarian bibliography proving that even more freedom titles do exist!

FLOW CHART DISCUSSIONS (COMPILATIONS OF INVOLVED DISCUSSIONS, WHOSE FACTS AND ARGUMENTS GROW LIKE LEAVES ON TWIGS AND BRANCHES, AWAY FROM THE ORIGINAL QUESTION, BUT ALWAYS REMAINING CONNECTED: I am not yet convinced that e.g. alphabetized handbooks, links inserted in texts, numerous linked websites and FAQs are good enough alternatives to "flow chart discussions". The latter can be laboriously compiled, to a considerable information density, on large sheets of paper, and by an individual (remembering many of his discussions or arguments found in his reading) and much easier by a like-minded group. With cheap duplication and communication options for the participants, these collaborators would not have to come together at a certain time and place. But photocopy prices for such large sheets, as well as postage rates, are almost prohibitive and mailing originals is risky. I once lent out several such sheets discussing the supposedly existing overpopulation problem. The P.O. managed to lose these originals in their return mailing. Such paper sheets (4x6 feet), each containing dozens to hundreds of entries, in a naturally grown "shrub" of arguments, around the main theme as a seed or starting point, all interconnected by branches, with the arguments represented on its leaves, could be cheaply reproduced, 6 at a time, on a single microfiche. There exist also special programs to produce them and access them on computer screens. Many libertarian proposals lead to very involved discussions (e.g. abortion, money, rights, forceful defence, limited vs. no government, free will) and could, perhaps, be optimally carried on in this format and brought more rapidly to a visible and so far unrefuted conclusions, than in the standard sequential, page by page format or merely by many inserted links. If such a discussion is offered on computer screens, then links could b