There are basically two ways to create free E-text: you can type or scan in something in the public domain (75 years old or older) or you can create new text that has a copyright notice like this one allowing anyone to copy and distribute the text. It is not enough merely to sell the information at a nominal cost. Unless you allow others the right to further distribute information it is not really "free", even if you sometimes give it away at no cost on a floppy disk.
In fact, the only *free* religious literature (and typing even this in was quite an accomplishment) consists of: The King James Bible (without Apocrypha), the Quran, the Nicene Creed, The Book of Mormon and related texts, the Bible in Hebrew, and the Kama Sutra. Certainly the various denominations should consider releasing their basic liturgical texts and a selection of their religious literature in free E-text form. Modern versions of the Bible are a problem because of copyright restrictions. It would certainly be a boon for some organization to make a modern version "free" in the sense that anyone could copy and distribute it.
<Part III> Advanced Techniques
<Chapter 18> Research Methods I: Basic Navigation Methods
The Internet is certainly a vast place. For the beginner, or for the experienced user who wants to do more than check an occasional bibliographic cross-reference to an FTP site, a navigation tool is almost essential. The three most common navigation tools are discussed here. They represent three different approaches to stategy, target constituency, target materials, and user interface (the part of the program that you see). The three services are known as GOPHER, the WIDE AREA INFORMATION SERVICE (WAIS, pron. "ways"), and the WORLD WIDE WEB (WWW or W3).
All three services are based on client-server technology. To make information *available* to others you need special software called a server. The user then uses a "client" program to access the information. "Clients" are often free—they are written by whoever funded the initial project or by volunteer hackers. The catch to using a client is that you have to have a *direct* (usually expensive) connection to the Internet. This is the main reason that a SLIP connection will become more and more important. It "fools" the net into thinking that you have a direct connection without the expense of hooking your computer to a Local Area Network and then to the Internet. You can use a client program on your own home or office computer if you have a SLIP connection.
Even if you don't yet have a SLIP connection—they're still a bit experimental—you can use the services listed here. As of this writing all three services allow free access to a client for demonstration purposes. There are a number of telnet addresses where you can try out these navigation tools. I expect that, as the traffic on the network increases, these public access sites will close down. But by then communications programs will routinely include SLIP and probably some version of the major "clients" as well.
One word of caution: all the services here are built on top of telnet and FTP. They just provide a different and perhaps more useful way of making Internet connections. Thus, the same service may appear in several guises, depending on the tool you use to connect to it. There are also gateways that let you access one service from the other—but often at a price in terms of useability. Since the software may not tell you that you are looking at, say, a Gopher-based service via WWW, you may have to try all three services to find the one that makes the most reliable connection.
Another factor to consider is that unless you have a direct or SLIP connection, you will be limited to using a command line interface. You will not experience the real power of, at least, WWW or WAIS. Nevertheless they are useful. In general, a beginner should use gopher first, then play with the other two services to see if they are useful to you.
The main problem you will have is *getting* the information you find. If you do not have the client program, this is difficult. You could cut and paste the information from your screen or use your communications program's "buffer" to store it. WAIS will send you the results of your search by E-mail. Often, you will have to resort to FTP to fetch the information once you have located it—if you can figure out where you are. One of my criticisms of search tools like Gopher or WAIS is that they often give you a very poor indication of where the information you found is physically located. This is especially true of the publically accessible versions.