On Line Libraries

The Internet is bearing fruit on providing mankind’s knowledge trove on demand, at no charge. Some of my personal favorite sites are listed here.

The Liberty Fund in Indianapolis, Indiana has started a wonderful project called the Online Library of Liberty. This website provides many of the classics of human thought in both html and pdf (Acrobat Reader) format for browsing or offline browsing via download. This material, in conjunction with the e-books section of the Mises Institute web site www.mises.org provides most of the material necessary for a free of charge classical education.

For tastes that are more contemporary and scientific then check out the Physics Archive at Cornell.

Math is my personal thing so I like to frequent Math World. The Math Reader product is wonderful and free.

Literature buffs may want to check out the ebooks at University of Virginia. The ebooks site is nice because it provides format for PDA’s via Palm and Microsoft Reader, all available free of charge. Next time you are trapped in an awful meeting boot up Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness or Beowulf on your PDA and go to a better place.
Shakespeare, the great bard(s) whoever they were, are also available.

General knowledge can be found at the wikipedia, where you can contribute your own knowledge, wisdom, and philosophy.

If you’ve always wanted to attend MIT but lack the GPA, tuition, money, necessary connections or just cannot tolerate the Boston weather or having to look at Harvard students on a regular basis, then get their open course work for free.

Consumer Warning: knowledge is not free, like respect, it has to be earned. The reader still has to put forth the effort to acquire it. It is a virtual natural resource of no intrinisic value  until human labor transforms it into something valuable. Here we can all stand on the shoulders of mankinds giants and see vistas that are beyond our individual limited horizons. Man millenniums of effort have gone into these works, but culture pays forward so we can reap the benefits today at a much smaller cost.

This is the inherent nature of capitalism lower cost, higher quality products for everyone's potential consumption. This is another fine example of the spontaneous organization from human action without any government intervention required.

Sadly, the web is also full of statism, porn, fads, hate speech of every imaginable variety, eco-gibberish, and new age silliness, but that is also the price of a free society: tolerance for speech that you abhor.