I am a missionary and pastor of a local church here in Mexico City. Since I have started my ministry, and even in Seminary and Bible College, I have been collecting good Christian works, especially reference works in order to help me in my sermon preparation, and in later years, to help me with my website content (I have 32 websites in English and Spanish) and my writing of tracts and books (mostly in Spanish, some translated back into English). As such, I have been downloading and copying files onto my computer, hard drive, and external hard drives and USBs, and DVDs. A normal DVD holds around 4.7 GBs or 4.3GBs really of files. This did not satisfy my need for space, so I have a DVD drive that can burn and read 100 GBs of data (93GB actual files). When I bought that drive, I bought around 20 100GB virgin disks with it. So I have a lot of space. Slowly I have been filling that up with files, mostly books, Christian books, and specifically Christian reference works. I also work in moving content from pdfs or other formats into web pages, into e-Sword, theWord, and MySword (and Kindle) formats. So things “get collected” in any of these formats and can be moved into another format.
But things are a mess in my house. Recently (in May) my laptop is having hard drive problems, and I had to do a Microsoft System reset, and it didn’t go well. Everything except my programs got restored, and for example, all of the theWord bibles are considered by that Microsoft software to be program files and I lost them all.
So, this is what is happening, I am restoring things from my backups (external drives and DVDs mostly). As I am organizing and restoring things, I am realizing that I have so much stuff, and lost so much stuff, and duplicated so much stuff, that I don’t even know where to begin really.
For example, I have a 1TB external hard drive, and as I register everything with a program I recently purchased, Advance File Organizer, I am seeing some interesting things. For one thing, everything is separated into different folders and mixed with other material. I am sorting that out slowly. But I did a search on that 1 TB drive or one of the 100GB drives for *.twm, and I got 46,000 files that showed up. Granted that there are sometimes 5 or more different copies of a single work, that is still around 10,000 theWord modules in that single place. Like I said, I have a bunch of these, and most probably, there is a lot of duplication. Having duplicates is good in a backup system. If one particular file is corrupt, then I can grab the same file from somewhere else.
SO I am getting older, which translated into common terms, I cannot sit on my rear end more than 2 hours at a time now. So my time at the computer is getting less and less, and I have to get up and walk around a lot more times and for longer periods to go back at it again.
I am putting up a lot of theWord modules at www.twmodules.com , but even so, this battle I am waging is not going well. In a typical week I search the Internet for material for whatever topic I am preaching on Sunday, and I can easily download around 50 more PDFs per week. A lot of them can be made into modules and uploaded to my website.
So the short of this is, I want to make some of this material available to the general public. But there are problems.
#1 Some is under copyright.
So I cannot make that material public, and a lot of work is involved in deciding that question at times. It is not so simple as copying everything and sending somebody a zip with them all. When I download books, I usually don’t go through the process to see if they are under copyright. I am more concerned with deciding if there is any value in them. So many times when I go through a folder with books on doctrines or something, I delete some good works because they are under copyright.
#2 Some are not correctly formatted
If I do send people modules from my archive Library, I know what will happen. There are sometimes poor formatting that prevents even seeing the entire work, or it is an eyesore looking at it, and they will write me back wanting me to format it. Fine. I can do that. But I am a missionary, a pastor, a writer, and somewhere in there a husband and father. My time is stretched thin.
But somebody wants me to reformat a work, okay, that may take from 10 minutes to a couple of hours or more if there are OCR errors in the work. It is not very simple. But I can do that. Remember, my priorities (which is what counts for me) is first my ministry and family, and so if I am preaching on a topic, and the work you want is on that same topic, GREAT! Everything goes in together great. But if it is not what I am preaching on, or even worse, it is on a topic that I don’t even believe in, for example, universalism, that everybody will end up in heaven, then why would I want to spend all that time on that? I see no profitability in that for me. Maybe you are preaching a series on that, and need original sources, fine I have a folder with a coupe dozen works by them on their doctrine. I can help. But I am not really going to spend a day of my time doing so.
As an additional comment here, some modules simply are made by somebody else, and they don’t work. They won’t load in eSword or theWord, and even if they do, you don’t see the text of the chapters. Amazing to see the names of the chapters, and clicking on any one of them makes it disappear. I don’t know why that happens (too busy to investigate it) but I know that has happened several times before on me. In MySword, the converted utility doesn’t work if the theWord module is compressed or locked against editions. So it does produce a MySword file (*.mybible) but of zero bytes. So I go through deleting these zero byte files and go back to theWord and make the changes necessary and try again. It is not a matter of simply copying files. You have to look at them somewhat. Even so, bad modules still pop up. For a few, the title of the module did not match with the content. 🙁
#3 Scrapers
For those of you out there, there are people who comb through your websites and scrap it. They take everything you are offering and they copy it off of your website, and put it up on their website. Fine. It happens. But I have at least 2 or 3 of these people that have written me telling me that they visit my websites DAILY and take everything new I put up. So they have great websites because they have 20 other people uploading different material, and one of them scrapes my website, so nobody wants to visit my website any more. #1 I get a small amount of Google Adsense revenue from those bothersome ads on my website, and the lack of traffic means that instead of $35/month in revenue from my 32 websites, I only get $15 to $20/month, and it decreases over time because Google itself doesn’t want to give me any income like they are supposed to. #2 People donate at times, and these people are donating on these other people’s websites because of all the great Bible modules they have (half or more of which they got from me). So I don’t get any donations, and apart from a fellow that is helping me with my websites who donates every month, we can go for 6 months with no donations, and then 1 $20 donation. Just the way it is, sorry.
Donate: paypal.me/davidcoxmex
But these guys are on top of me making my life difficult if not impossible. They say imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. Let them do whatever. But I am not copying all my files to give to them either.
PROBLEM: If I bundle these files into zips of 25MB to 35MBs, they will want all of them, and I have done that, and they usually don’t want to pay anything for them. So if I offer 20GBs of theWord module files or eSword module files, they will want all of them and for free.
This gets worse, because if I try to sell them, I have to have that much space on my websites (mysword, Kindle, eSword, theWord, etc) and bandwidth available to move that kind of gigabytes of data and it just becomes a problem. We have some websites that are up around 10GBs of traffic as it is, and that is without any bundling, i.e. only 1 module per download.
Because of these scrapers and their activity, I cannot just upload a zip file with that much data. So there are alternatives, but again, I am not populating freely and fast other people’s websites. For people who are pastors wanting good works, yes, I will help you.
The Plan
So my plan is the following, I will receive requests from people for theWord modules (eSword and mySword also). But these requests are limited. Do not think I will stop everything else I am doing, and search on DVDs and external hard drives and find them and send them to you in a few hours. So things are easiest to find that others. As I organize and put modules on my hard drive, this will be easier to find things, but as of now, I see I have a copy of a file, but I cannot locate the DVD that it is listed as being on. Since the System reset, I have had that happen about 5 times in things I am looking for for me.
So if you write me, requesting a specific work, that is very helpful. It is something that I can look for, find, and send to you.
Please note that I have about 2600 modules on the website at the present, and of those, about 1,500 of them are already posted. So please check by searching the website before you request a module. If it is there, download it rather than writing to me. At times, I rework the module and the post and set it to repost in the future like a new module. So they may be waiting a few months before their time comes up to come alive again. I will check if that is the case before I do anything else.
So what I am asking is a few things from you.
Free modules that I will send to you.
I am willing to find 1 module per month and send it to you for free. The conditions are the same for all of these offers: 1) It is not under copyright or I have permission from the copyright owner to distribute them. 2) I can find the module in question. (I might take a few weeks, but usually if it is listed in my archive library, I can find it quickly). 3) The module is in a good state, i.e. I can open it with the specified program, and it will open and you can read it. 4) You are willing to use the module even if it is poorly formatted.
Example,
“Free Request: Simpson-Christ in the OT”
Request these by sending the above text to my email, [email protected].
1 per month.
Before contacting me, please consult the Site Index page to see if your module is already posted.
More than 1/month
I am willing to do this for more than 1 module per month per person, but with some more conditions. These are: 1) I am charging 10 cents per module for my trouble in finding it and sending it. This is to discourage scrapers from asking me for all of the modules I have. 2) For these 10 cent donation modules, I am asking that you limit these requests to 20-25 per month. 3) any module I cannot find, I will put it on a hunt list, and if I come across it at some future point, I will send it to you. Note that if I cannot find a viable, good module in your list, I will not refund you the 10 cent donation. Come on! It is only 10 cents!
Example,
“Request List
lastname-title1
lastname-title2
lastname-title3”
Request these by sending the above text to my email, [email protected]. You should calculate .10/title, no more than 25 requests per month please. Make a donation of 10 cents per title, and send it to:
Donate: paypal.me/davidcoxmex
Note that those pastors that are regular supporters of our ministry can request without limit. They should be donating at least $50/month.
Before contacting me, please consult the Site Index page to see if your module is already posted.
Republication of these modules on other websites
Unfortunately, the copyright laws come into play. Although I would discourage people from ripping off my entire website to put up on their copycat website, these are public domain works, so you cannot make conditions on public domain works. The best I can do is to throttle how much people can do from my works. Likewise if you want to send a specific work to a friend or fellow pastor or send them to a bunch of pastors, or put them on your personal blog, go ahead. Just please be aware of the rules and courtesy of not SPAMMING people.
NOTE: I will also reformat the module before I send it to you in most cases, so most probably I will upload it to my website. If that is the case, I will send you links to your modules. You can send other people these links instead of clogging everybody’s email in box with files.
Requests for priority for a module
Apart from what I said above, in each of the pages linked to this page, the pages with -A- tw modules, for example, there is a commentary section. If you request that I put a priority on a specific module on that page in the comments, I will try to get to that first.
How to Request
Go to the page where you found the module listed, and add your “Priority Request: module name” in the comments section. Please verify that your email address is correct, because I will send you a reminder or where or how to download it via email.
Caveat Emptor
Note that what you get here is simply what it is. Please do not feel that you have any rights. If you wrote a work and don’t want it included here, write me, and I will remove it as per your wishes. You do have a right then.
But if you are just a normal theWord user, please do not demand things from me. I am serving the Lord by helping you here. Please be nice, be patient, and say thank you, and if you can send a donation. Okay?
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I am looking for volunteers and workers
Paid Workers – Note that I live in Mexico, and I have access to young people who would be willing to upload more modules. But the problem is that they don’t even speak much English. I need to pay them something. For $1, they can upload a couple of modules. But all the donations that do happen to come in go to paying hosting fees, domain fees, etc. If you would like to donate to these young people, please let me know.
Volunteers – If you know how to make posts in WordPress, maybe you would like to join us in this ministry. Note that I am looking for people who are aware of SEO principles, because people find our modules because of SEO. So you have to know how to make a post that is the correct SEO for Google. You also need to know how to reformat a module in theWord. Either thing or both would be useful.
Before contacting me, please consult the Site Index page to see if your module is already posted.