Since the current administration is hellbent on rewriting history, censoring education and destroying public access to information, it might be a good time to think about the information we still have available to us that hasn’t been commoditized or banned yet and how we might preserve it while we still can.
One defense against the brutalization of our society is to propagate the information we still have access to into our own physical libraries while we still can. Such libraries can take the form of a book shelf, or it can take the form of a digital media storage device, as long as the device or the shelf is owned by you and not some corporation that can take it away from you.
Physical books are more resistant to circumstances like hardware failures and the obsolescence of digital devices and formats. Books are also immune to the foul play enabled by Digital Rights Management systems (DRM) that effectively take control of the media that you may have purchased but gives control of that media to the distribution systems. On the other hand, digital media is more portable, easier to hide and more resistant to assaults, such as book burnings. It’s probably best to do as much of both as you can.
In this article, I will share my method for creating an extensive digital library without spending a dime over the cost of a digital storage device and the electricity to operate it. All I ask is that you keep in mind that this isn’t just for your own personal advantage; Your efforts will be instrumental in preserving information for society in general.
Am I being dramatic here? Perhaps. But this is one of those things where if you wait until conditions justify the drama it might be too late. We are in fact experiencing a level of assault on information already that we have not seen before, including the complete defunding of public broadcasting, removal of historical references and pressure to change school curriculums.
According to data from the American Library Association (ALA), 2023 saw the highest number of banned titles ever recorded. Over 4,200 unique books were challenged in 2023 alone, which is a 65% jump from 2022. This coincides with a growing anti-woke and revisionist movement that is fully embraced by the president today. In my assessment, this qualifies as an early warning.
So, once you have some form of digital media storage that is physically in your possession, the next step is to find sources for what you feel are important references. My favorite source is the Internet Archive [archive.org], which is a non-profit library containing a massive volume of free text, movies, software, music and websites in the public domain.
Using this resource alone, I have added enough movies ranging from classics like Citizen Kane to Box Office hits like the James Bond series to my media server to give me months of commercial free entertainment. But I have also used the Internet Archive to find copies of the U.S. Constitution, the Federalist Papers and the controversial but classic Uncle Tom’s Cabin. I encourage you to explore. The Internet Archive is free to access, free to browse and free to download and as of yet has not been eliminated by authoritarians.
I also use a free and open source library program called Calibre [ https://calibre-ebook.com/download ], which provides a great way to organize the books that I’ve downloaded. It’s available for Windows, macOS, Linux, Android and iOS. The entire codebase is available on GitHub, so for those who know Python and C, you can customize your own version.
Welcome to the world where we humans decide what we want instead allowing corporations, governments and religious prudes to decide for us. In other words, freedom.