FOREWORD TO THE WEB VERSION

December 1999

I have decided to publish all new ICE books on the World Wide Web. ICE will no longer publish printed paper versions. There are several reasons for this. First, there is only one piece of conventional typesetting software that automatically inserts footnotes at the bottom of the page, where I like them: Ventura 8.0. I have not been able to find any typesetter that I can afford who can use this program. It took one of the nation's leading experts in Ventura 8.0 almost two years to typeset Inheritance and Dominion, and the bill was $13,000. I cannot afford to spend this much time or money. Second, I can get a new book onto the Web in one day. Paper printing takes months. Third, ICE saves anywhere from $12,000 to $20,000 in printing costs per 3,000 copies. Fourth, I save many hours of tedious indexing. Fifth, I can update a book inexpensively and rapidly. Sixth, and by far the most important, I can afford to give the book away. This means the book will be available to far more people, especially those living in underdeveloped nations.

There are advantages for the user, too. First, he can store the book electronically. With various search engines, he can retrieve information easily. I plan to make available an HTML search engine on this site if a freeware or shareware version ever appears. Second, he can easily forward a book or a chapter to friends. Third, he gets it for free. If he wants to print it out, he can. He pays for paper and toner, but only if it is worth it to him. Fourth, he can save blocks of text if he has a free form data base. He can use keywords for future retrieval.

The defects of Web publishing are still with us. First, reading from a screen is not as pleasant for most people as reading from a page. It is never as fast. Second, there are problems in footnoting an HTML book's page numbers in a report. HTML pages in a document are not numbered. This is because the number of pages will change whenever they are re-formatted on-screen. If a matching PDF document is not available (as in the case of this book), he cannot see the original pages' numbers. The HTML version is the original.

Nevertheless, the price advantages for a nonprofit publisher outweigh the technical defects. The price saving is passed along to the consumer. I will go with Web publishing for the foreseeable future.

New printing technologies now make possible small print runs for books like this -- as few as one copy. I plan to make available a way for you to order a paperback version of my out-of-print books. This way, there are no inventory costs. The buyer's price per book will be higher, but the savings in up-front printing costs will make possible the publishing of far more books. Other authors who share my views will probably see the advantage of getting their ideas in front of tens of thousands of interested readers.

The Web is the wave of the future. I plan to ride that wave full-time from now on. Surf's up!

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To keep the Institute for Christian Economics alive, we do need small donations to pay the two secretaries. I get no salary. You pay only for the ideas, not for pieces of paper and ink. If you get $1 in value from a chapter, donate a dollar. If you get $5 in value from the ideas in the whole book, donate $5. It is your assessment. If a book changes your life, you might consider donating as much as $25.

What does a book cost you? The best way to find out is to estimate the value of the time you spend reading it. The time invested is usually far more valuable than the money it cost you to buy it.

You will get the books' value without paying. You can be a "free rider." If this voluntary payment system works well enough to pay the secretaries and run a few classified ads in Christian magazines for this Web site, I will stick with it. But if ICE cannot pay the secretaries, then I will have to adopt some sort of library card fee: a closed site. I prefer to avoid this.

Mail donations to:

I.C.E.

P. O. Box 8000

Tyler, TX 75711

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