The Purpose/Dream of this Site

This site is, to my knowledge, the largest free repository of LDS and LDS related material on the Internet. My dream for this site is that it will have available as many of the LDS authored books (nonfiction) as possible, that are in the public domain.

In order to accomplish this goal, I am asking for donations of copies of any LDS book that was published before 1923 or any copies of the Improvement Era. If any book was published before 1923, then that edition (newer editions after 1923 could still be copyrighted) would be in the public domain, and could be put on the Internet. The Improvement Era was not copyrighted, so it is in the public domain.

I know many of you, or people you know, have such books, and many times they are just gathering dust on a bookshelf somewhere. I'm asking that you donate such books so that the message that they carried can be read and enjoyed by everyone today, and for generations to come.

Many such books were written with the help and support of the First Presidency (such as Jesus the Christ, by James Talmage), yet are not being published by any current publishing company, and therefore are left to book collectors or our bookshelves, probably being lost, abandoned or, at least, unknown to the vast majority of the world. Many of these books contain information and knowledge that is applicable to our day and time, just as as it was when it was written.

What I'm proposing is to help preserve and make available these books to the world. But, I need your help.

I will give my time to scan in, OCR, format, and "infobase" books that you donate. And, I'll make them available on the Internet for free.

Now, if you would like to donate a book (or several), then please email me for more information.

Please look at the first few pages of the book, and find the date of publishing or copyright. If that date is 1923 or earlier, then the text of that edition is in the public domain and I can put it on the Internet. If requested, I will return the book(s) to you, but I will have chopped the spine off of the book, and it won't be in one piece after that. (It's a choice of preserving the paper the words are printed on and making the book scarce, or cutting the spine off, but preserving the ideas and knowledge the book contains and allowing anyone to have access to it.) In special cases, I will scan in a book without cutting the spine off, but this will need to be pre-arranged.

I have a high-speed duplex scanner that works like a Kinkos copy machine, where you set the book on top of it, and it scans both sides of the paper in one pass, as long as all the pages are separate pieces of paper, hence the need to cut the spine off.

I will not do books of Family histories, or other personal works. I want to mainly stay with commercially published works at this time.

Thank you,
Ryan