May 3, 2010 5:11PM

Liberty on a Disk

By David Boaz

To celebrate its 50th anniversary, Liberty Fund has just produced an amazing item — The Portable Library of Liberty, a single DVD containing the complete texts of more than 1000 books, audio interviews with 26 great scholars, and more. And it’s free for the asking!


Just take a look at what you could be carrying in your laptop:

1,001 full text titles in PDF format, self‐​contained and searchable. They are organized by titles, subject areas, and topics. Highlights include the complete scholarly editions of the works of Adam Smith, David Ricardo, John Stuart Mill; the collected works of Jefferson, Madison, John Adams, & many others; and 166 full‐​text books published by Liberty Fund.


works by hundreds of authors from Ancient Sumeria to the present, organized by people, periods, and schools of thought, such as the French Enlightenment, the Founding Fathers, 19th century natural rights theorists, the Austrian School of Economics, and many others.


audio interviews with 26 leading scholars from the Intellectual Portrait Series: Conversations with Leading Classical Liberal Figures of Our Time and 7 lectures on The Legacy of Friedrich Hayek.


a collection of Quotations about Liberty & Power which is a compilation of all the quotes of the week that have appeared on the front page of the Online Library of Liberty since its inception.

My initial response was, if all that stuff is on the web, then why do you need a DVD? And I guess there are two answers to that: First, there are people around the world who have computers but not regular internet access. Liberty Fund officers say that a typical request is something like “I am a masters student in economics at the national university in Bangladesh. Thanks for making this available to me. We do not have these titles in our library. Can I make another copy to give to my friends?”


And second, there are times that all of us could access a DVD but not the internet, such as on flights.


So — at the low, low cost of … nothing, it’s truly an amazing deal. Order yours today. Or you could wait for the 6th edition later this year, when all the titles will be in the new ePub format for even easier reading on portable devices. The pace of progress quickens!