Because of the limited access there is to texts that explore and explain the principles and foundations of a free society in many countries around the world Network for a Free Society has created a mini-library on CD in English. Although these are fairly old fashioned technology they are relatively cheap to send and make texts available in countries where internet connection maybe too slow or expensive to be widely useful and available.
The first and second editions contained about 100 texts and the 3rd Edition, that was released in July 2014, has about 125 texts on it. Some are short books, some are parts of books or articles. Authors include Bastiat, Smith, Mill, Mises, Hayek, Friedman and many more.
Copyrights were purchased for 5000 of the 1st edition and 100,000 of the 2nd edition which meant that we could only make and distribute that number of CDs. By about April of 2014 we had run out of copyrights for the 3rd edition which had been distributed through our partners in about 50 countries on every continent.
For the 3rd edition we decided to leave out any texts for which we would be required to purchase the copy rights, so that we could make as many copies as we liked and more importantly those who had copies could make further copies for their students or friends. We did have to leave off a few excellent texts but there were others with which to replace them and many people were prepared to allow us to use their texts without paying copyright. We made 50,000 copies and within a few months over 20,000 had been sent to partners in Africa and Asia.
In addition to the CD in English we were able to help our partners create CDs in a number of other languages including Chinese, Kyrgyz, Portuguese, Russian, Turkish and French and one will be released in Arabic during 2015. Many translations have been made into Farsi but these have been published in hard copy rather than circulated on a CD.