DIGITAL LIBRARY PROJECT

We are seeking funding to provide a $4,000 collection of 250,000 CD-based books to 1,000 libraries across the country. Purchased in volume, we can secure this collection for less than half price, but the collection's value compared with books in print is 100 times greater than the $4,000 retail cost.

Numerous libraries have already responded to our initial contact with interest in participating in this program.

Each library would receive the collection of CD-based books and reading enhancement programs involving 100 CDs with more than 250,000 total books and 3,000 different titles. Most of the CDs contain thousands of books, with a program embedded that will read the books to the "readers," if they prefer, highlighting each word as it goes and bookmarking where the reader stops. The CD is great for all readers but particularly valuable to the sight-impaired, to the ailing and to English language learners.

The collection includes classics by:

Daniel DeFoe

William Shakespeare

Plato

Oscar Wilde

Charles Dickens

Jules Verne

David Thoreau

Robert Louis Stevenson

H.G. Wells

Arthur Conan Doyle

Edgar Allan Poe

O. Henry

E. Nesbit

Victor Appleton

Stephen Vincent Benet

Max Beerbohm

John Greenleaf Whittier

Jack London

Anton Chekhov

Mark Twain

Rudyard Kipling

Jonathan Swift

Thomas Hardy

George Eliot

Stephen Crane

Sigmund Freud

Abraham Lincoln

Thackeray

Aesop

Charles Kingsley

Lewis Carroll

George Bernard Shaw

Henry James

Hans Christian Anderson

Leo Tolstoy

Ayn Rand

John Milton

Washington Irving

Edgar Rice Burroughs

James Fenimore Cooper

Horatio Alger Jr.

Zane Grey

Sir Walter Scott

Thomas Paine

Martin Luther

Alexis de Toqueville

John Dewey

Henry Longfellow

Cervantes

Christopher Marlowe

Thomas Carlyle

Jane Austen

Alfred Tennyson

Francis Bacon

Charles Darwin

Louisa May Alcott

Henry van Dyke

Patrick Henry

John Bunyan

Nathaniel Hawthorne

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Martin Luther King Jr.

H.L. Mencken

John F. Kennedy

Victor Hugo

Voltaire

Honore de Balzac

Sinclair Lewis

Bret Harte

Howard Pyle

Herman Melville

Booth Tarkington

James Russell Lowell

Virginia Woolf

Sophocles

Robert Burns

T.S. Eliot

Samuel Johnson

Robert E. Lee

Edna St. Vincent Millay

Oliver Wendell Holmes

Winston Churchill

John Madison

John Ruskin

E. Phillips Oppenheim

Mary Roberts Rinehart

Emile Zola

Andrew Lange

Homer

Samuel Adams

Upton Sinclair

The collection also includes:

* A complete computerized reading curriculum for young readers, remedial readers and English language learners

* Several years of the CIA Factbook and other references

* Data from the U.S. Census

* The Holy Bible

* NASA photos from outer space

* Music

These books can be printed out, downloaded into Palm Pilots and other PDAs, or read with computers. Within the next five years, we will see that over 90% of all adults will have PDAs or notebook computers that they will regularly carry with them. The quality and portability will greatly improve while the cost will continue to drop.

We are seeking funding to provide this $4,000 collection of 250,000 books to 1,000 libraries across the country as a pilot project. We will ask the libraries to track the usage and to survey the users over the coming years.

If you represent a library that would like to receive this collection free of charge, please write a letter supporting our fund-raising efforts. Your letter of support should include the following talking points:

* Recognition that the spread of Palm Pilots, other PDAs, notebook computers, and other computers over the next five years will greatly increase the demand for computer-based literature.

* Comparative value of securing a 250,000-book collection of such classics and references.

* Value of such a collection in providing for the needs of such special populations as the sight-impaired, the home-bound, and English-language learners.

Donors are also encouraged to contact us about this important program.

Thanks,

Ken Harvey, President

The International Education Institute