MComzLibrary

Offline knowledge library that ships pre-installed with MComzOS.

What's in it

Three book collections (ZIM files) of freely redistributable content:

ZIM	Contents	Texts
MComz-Survival.zim	Medical, survival, civil defence, engineering, communications, water and sanitation	18
MComz-Literature.zim	Classic literature for morale, education, and younger readers	27
MComz-Scriptures.zim	Religious and philosophical texts from seven major world traditions	12

Each ZIM opens to a welcome page generated from the matching docs/intros/INTRO_<CAT>.md. The intro is the contents listing - edit the prose, rebuild, and the ZIM picks it up.

Curation philosophy

Sustainable Survival - the ability for you and your family to thrive without impacting the ability of others to thrive, now or in the future.

Every text is selected on those terms, to help communities move from crisis through recovery to long-term self-sufficiency.

Contents

Each collection's selection notes - why each text earned its place, and what we excluded and why - live in the linked intro file. Title links below go to a clean online reader where one exists; the ZIM bundles everything regardless.

Survival (selection notes)

Medical

• HSE INDG347: Basic First Aid at Work (UK HSE)
• FM 4-25.11 First Aid (US Army, 2002)
• The Ship's Medicine Chest and Medical Aid at Sea (US PHS, 2003)
• SOF Medical Handbook (US DoD; for trained medics)

Survival, navigation, civil defence

• FM 21-76 Survival (US Army)
• AFH 10-644 Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape (US Air Force)
• FM 3-25.26 Map Reading and Land Navigation (US Army)
• Are You Ready? (US FEMA)
• CERT Basic Training (US FEMA)

Communications, rigging, mechanics, electrical

• MCRP 3-40.3C Antenna Handbook (USMC)
• Boatswain's Mate Manual NAVEDTRA 14343A (US Navy)
• Basic Machines and How They Work, NAVEDTRA 14037 (US Navy, 1994)
• NEETS modules 1, 2, 3, 4, 18 (US Navy, via maritime.org)

Water and sanitation

• EPA Emergency Disinfection of Drinking Water (US EPA)

Literature (selection notes)

• Complete Works of William Shakespeare
• The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Arthur Conan Doyle
• The Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
• Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
• Frankenstein - Mary Shelley
• Jane Eyre - Charlotte Brontë
• Wuthering Heights - Emily Brontë
• Little Women - Louisa May Alcott
• Middlemarch - George Eliot
• The Awakening - Kate Chopin
• The Call of the Wild - Jack London
• Treasure Island - Robert Louis Stevenson
• Meditations - Marcus Aurelius (Long trans.)
• The Art of War - Sun Tzu (Giles trans.)
• Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám (FitzGerald trans.)
• Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass - Frederick Douglass
• Up from Slavery - Booker T. Washington
• The Souls of Black Folk - W.E.B. Du Bois
• The Jungle Book - Rudyard Kipling
• Alice's Adventures in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll (Tenniel illustrations)
• Winnie-the-Pooh - A.A. Milne
• Aesop's Fables (Jacobs trans.)
• The Arabian Nights - Andrew Lang, 1898
• Shakuntala - Kalidasa (Ryder trans.)
• 170 Chinese Poems (Waley trans., 1918)
• West African Folk Tales - Barker & Sinclair, 1917
• Scouting for Boys - Robert Baden-Powell, 1908

Scriptures (selection notes)

• Berean Standard Bible - CC0 modern English, Protestant canon
• King James Version - 1611 English, Protestant canon
• World English Bible, Ecumenical Edition - modern English with the Deuterocanon (Catholic / Orthodox canon)
• The Book of Enoch (1 Enoch) - R.H. Charles trans.; canonical in Ethiopian Orthodox Christianity
• The Book of Mormon - 1830 edition
• The Quran - Yusuf Ali / Pickthall / Shakir side-by-side
• The Bhagavad Gita - Edwin Arnold's The Song Celestial
• The Upanishads - Max Müller, Sacred Books of the East
• The Dhammapada - Max Müller, 1881
• Tao Te Ching - James Legge trans.
• The Analects of Confucius - James Legge trans.
• JPS Tanakh (1917) - Jewish Publication Society

Building

Requires zim-tools (for zimwriterfs) and pandoc.

git clone https://github.com/MComz-org/MComzLibrary.git
cd MComzLibrary
./scripts/download-sources.sh    # idempotent; failures listed in download-failures.txt
./scripts/build-zims.sh          # outputs to dist/

A monthly GitHub Actions workflow (.github/workflows/build-zims.yml) runs the same pipeline on the 1st of each month and publishes a prerelease tagged vYYYY.MM.DD with the three ZIMs attached.

Adding a source

One entry in scripts/download-sources.sh and one row in the matching docs/intros/INTRO_<CAT>.md table. Selection criteria - licence, language, relevance - are in docs/RATIONALE.md.

Documentation

• docs/RATIONALE.md - selection criteria, licence verification, permission-request tracker.
• docs/TODO.md - in-flight items.
• docs/TASK_CODE.md, TASK_DEEP_RESEARCH.md, TASK_DESKTOP.md - per-role task sheets used during the initial build-out.

Contributing

Contributions welcome, especially:

• Translations - help produce ZIMs in other languages.
• Regional foraging guides - public-domain texts for your region.
• Licence verification - help confirm redistribution terms for sources we haven't cleared.
• Content suggestions - public-domain or CC BY / CC BY-SA texts that fit Sustainable Survival.

Please open an issue before starting on anything large.

Coming soon

• Publishing the ZIMs via the Kiwix public library so anyone can install Kiwix on their phone and pull at least WikiMed Mini plus the three MComz ZIMs once available. Until then, all four are pre-installed with every MComzOS installation.
• WHO Psychological First Aid Guide in Survival - mental-health triage alongside Stop the Bleed and CPR. The section in INTRO_SURVIVAL.md is empty pending this. Subject to permission from WHO.
• Hesperian's Where There Is No Doctor and four companion titles in Survival - the standard field reference for clinics without doctors. Subject to permission from Hesperian.
• Sphere humanitarian minimum standards in Survival - the handbook used by humanitarian responders for shelter, WASH, food security, and health. Subject to permission from Sphere.
• Four further Literature classics - Panchatantra, Waley's Monkey, a condensed Ramayana, Sa'di's Gulistan. Parked until clean public-domain sources or permissions are in hand.

Licence

The ZIM files contain no NC-licensed material, so they can be freely redistributed, remixed, and built upon. Individual source texts retain their original licences (noted in the Rationale).

Repository tooling and documentation: MIT.

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Martin's input, lovingly crafted in Scotland with vibe.