Today is the 8th of January 2025, and over the last few days I have uploaded a lot of commentaries (everything I have on https://www.theword-commentary-modules.com/). And on that site, I have around 560 files, about 2.9 Gigabytes. I have not gone through my hard disk to sort out and upload commentaries from those files. That is still the future. As I work through my own theWord stacks on my hard drive (1112 files about 61.8 gigabytes, but there are a lot of duplicates that I am deleting), I will be adding more commentaries to this present site. I am converting works from PDF and ESword and creating new theWord modules. I have another 21 gigabytes (9,000+) in eSword files in the new stack’s folder I am making for them, and I haven’t finished finding (and moving them into their stacks fold) in other folders yet either. My total number of *.topx on my hard drive is 14,000+ files including those 9000. So I am going to be working on this for some time yet. Pray that the Lord gives me health, energy, clearness of mind, and finances to keep this up.
An Observation
As I have been collecting works for my library over the last 20 years or so, I take what others offer as well as making my own files (and I write my own books also). I cannot inspect each and every module individually (but if you find some problems, corruption of the file, invalid copyright infraction, etc. you can email me a [email protected] and I will look into it).
At times, somebody has made a single commentary of a work, say G. Campbell Morgan, his commentary on Acts. Later on, the entire library of Morgan’s commentaries are made, and are available. At the present, I am uploading everything I can, and weeding out duplicate files, but sometimes, a person is just assembling a group of commentaries on a particular book of the Bible that they are studying, and having that particular commentary broken out from the entire Bible set of Commentaries by that author is an advantage.
Please take this into account. In general, I’m trying to not have duplicates on the website. Again, please read my post on Our Card Catalog to understand how one work has one “shelf” or place where it is physically present, and yet it appears on other pages of this website. That is not an error, it is a design feature. There are not more than one file, just one file in one place, and links to that file in other places. In other words, you can safely overwrite the same file when you download, knowing what is happening.
Today the download count is about 1400 Christian Reference Books on the site, all for free. Yet it has been several years since anybody has donated to the up-keep of this website. I shoulder that burden and blessing alone, it would seem. I work not for money nor fame, but to please my Lord and Savior. He will repay me in eternity. (Even a simple cup of water given in the name of Jesus is rewarded.) So, the way I understand my financial situation with my 34 websites, I need about 125 dollars per year (per website) to keep things up and running (plus many hundred of hours working on it).
I have given up on Google as they have made it a full-time professional website designer to just get income from them. I have had days with about 1 million hits on various of my websites, yet with Google ads on these sites, I am making about 5 cents per day. There has only been 1 day with that many hits. There are many sites that get more than 2000 visitors in a day. (twmodules is now running about 2,000 to 3,000 visitors per day, and one day so far in January had 50,000 visitors in a single day, probably bots trying to do a denial of service, because the downloads for that day did not jump any.)
But if only 25 users would donate just $5 PER YEAR for maintaining this website, my financial burden would be eased. People are paying around that much for a bottle of water or cup of coffee, $2.50 to $5.00 at Starbucks, and yet while I have 60 gigabytes of download traffic each month, nobody gives anything as a rule. If I get one or two donations a year of from $25 to $50 from all of my 34 websites combined, that is a good year.
If you purchased 1500 Christian Books in a Christian Bookstore or even online, how much would it cost you? Somebody pays for even the free stuff, you know. I doubt you could build much of a Christian Reference library if you limited the price of each book to $5 (what I am suggesting as a minimum donation PER YEAR), but that would place it at $7,500.
You say these things are in the public domain! Yes, and I am not selling them. I am giving them away! But there is a lot of work to first find good Christian books, then reformat the text you find them in to something usable, like theWord. Correct the OCR errors. I have studied Greek and Hebrew in Seminary. I take out the garbled text and replace it with Greek and Hebrew text, as in the image PDF. Sometimes a 200-page work has Greek and Hebrew through almost every page. I do this for God’s people. Then to organize these works and present them to the public. All that work is disdained by users who use without giving anything back EVER! Just saying, we will all give account before the Lord one day, and these things should be going through the minds of every faithful and obedient Christian.
1 Timothy 5:18 For the scripture saith, Thou shalt not muzzle the ox that treadeth out the corn. And, The labourer is worthy of his reward
Makes you wonder, doesn’t? Recently I had a high visitor number of 50,000 visitors to twmodules.com in a single day. Yet no donations, and I also wonder if any of these people benefitting from my website would even give a short prayer for me and this ministry.
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