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Idea: the Rational Man's Library

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I was thinking that it would be useful to have a resource of non-copyrighted works of interest to Objectivists available for download. Is there any interest in this?

I have text files of the following works, which are either out of copyright, or for which permission can probably be obtained:

Aristotle - Categories by Aristotle

Aristotle - On Youth and Old Age

Aristotle - Poetics

Aristotle - The Athenian Constitution

Aristotle - Politics: A Treatise on Government

Aristotle - Ethics

Ayn Rand - Anthem

Ayn Rand - Screen Guide for Americans

Ayn Rand- TEXTBOOK OF AMERICANISM

Darwin - The Origin of Species

John Locke -A Essay Concerning the true original, extent, and end of Civil Government

Ludwig von Mises - Human Action

Immanuel Kant - The Critique of Pure Reason

The Writings of Thomas Paine Vol. II

Writings Of Thomas Paine -- Volume 4 (1779-1792) - The Age Of Reason

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I like this idea, too. If you want some oddball suggestions for possible inclusions:

Sun Tzu: The Art of War

Miyamoto Musashi: The Book of Five Rings

Confucious' writings (I'm not sure if there's an actual book of these)

That's all I've got right now.

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Holy cow tjgl! I was not aware of it.

I just checked through it and it is pretty amazing.

Darwin, Kant, Confucius, Sun Tzu, Locke, Aristotle, Paine, Jefferson, The Federalist....

All there.

Also, Gibbon, Austen, Twain, Dickens, Hugo, Ibsen....

Wow. I can put my Treo to use on long plane flights. Jeepers that's cool.

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I started researching formats last night. (I now have Cooper's The Pilot, and The Deerslayer and Rostand's The Romancers on my Treo for my next long plane flight.)

Gutenberg publishes mostly in text, and in an open source reader format for Palm called Plucker. The reader formats are interesting, but not a well developed software category yet so I'm not sure you want to spend time converting them into a format or other. Also, this is similar to the music standards wars going on, where the sale of eBooks is tied to proprietary reader formats. At best you want an "mp3" sort of format that is crossplatform readable.

For referring others to a work to read, then I would think you wouldn't have to reprint here, but just refer to Gutenberg where appropriate; however, their files cannot by referenced well online (just downloaded en masse). Some sort of universal format such as text would be most accessible.

If you have texts not available, could you submit them to Gutenberg? To cite a particular passage or section, maybe html?

Again, I'm not sure you want to reprint here, but maybe form as a Rational Man's "Wiki", with links to important works. I would certainly think that Aristotle, Locke and some of The Founders works are directly relevant.

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  • 2 weeks later...
Great idea! Do you know about The Gutenberg Project? They have some 20,000 books with expired copyrights (in the US) up for grabs. Maybe browsing through their library would help. <ahttp://forum.objectivismonline.com/uploads/emoticons/default_biggrin.png' alt=':D'>
There's also "Bartleby", and the UPenn "Online Free Books" index. Also, Librivox has a growing collection of recordings.
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