This may be the greatest news Atheists have had in a long time. One of the Nation's best collections of Freethought and Atheist literature is being scanned into a computer, page by page, and now is starting to be offered on computer-readable CDs at an affordable price. Web-wise Atheists have probably seen the early Bank of Wisdom files that have been available on several Web sites. The old files, unfortunately, contain many errors resulting from scanning and optical character (non)recognition software being less than perfect. The new files, however, are in PDF format. This gives a graphic image of each page and looks exactly like the page itself. However, these PDF files can be searched for words or sentences, and blocks of text can be high-lighted, copied, and pasted into word-processing systems in the same way one handles text files.
The brainchild of our good Atheist friend Emmett F. Fields, of Louisville, KY, these CDs are the product of his Bank of Wisdom company, which is dedicated to the preservation and electronic diffusion of the printed Atheist heritage.
Because Emmett has formatted his discs in Adobe® Acrobat® PDF format, they can be read by both IBM and Macintosh computers that have had Adobe® Acrobat® Reader installed. (An Acrobat® Reader with SEARCH for any computer can be downloaded FREE from the Adobe Web Site: http://www.adobe.com/).
(Note: the reader is included on each of the CD-ROMS)
