See the three tiers

What's in the library

Every Blackout Library ships with the sources below, and every unit carries this list on the device itself with the version and date of each source. We only include material we are licensed to distribute, and we credit its authors.

On every device

  • English Wikipedia, complete, with images. More than six million articles. Text by Wikipedia contributors under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license.
  • Stack Exchange communities on home improvement, electronics, outdoors, gardening, medical sciences and amateur radio. Contributions licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0.
  • Maps of North America, street level with terrain, searchable by place name. Map data from OpenStreetMap contributors under the Open Database License.
  • U.S. government preparedness and medical documents from FEMA and Ready.gov, the CDC, the USDA home canning guides, NOAA, USGS, and the U.S. Army survival and first-aid manuals. Works of the United States government, in the public domain.
  • Emergency reference packs on post-disaster response, medicine, water, knots and food preparation, assembled by the Kiwix project under open licenses.
  • About 1,200 public-domain books, carefully typeset, from Standard Ebooks.
  • The Blackout field guides on first aid, water, food storage, communications and home security, written and edited for this device by Blackout Library.

Added on Signature

  • Wikibooks, Wiktionary, Wikivoyage and Wikiversity (Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike)
  • Maps of Europe with terrain shading (OpenStreetMap)
  • The full public-domain book set from Standard Ebooks

Added on Vault

  • Wikipedia in Spanish, French, German and Chinese, with images
  • World maps with terrain shading
  • Every Stack Exchange community
  • Open-access medical research from PubMed Central (Creative Commons Attribution articles)
  • The complete public-domain book collection, more than 60,000 titles

What is not on it, and why

Some well-known sources are licensed for non-commercial use only, which means we cannot sell a device with them on it. We would rather leave them out than ship them without permission. Where we have been able to license additional material, it appears in the list above.

A note on medical content

The medical and survival material on this device is reference material from published sources. It is not a substitute for professional care or emergency services. Call for help whenever you can.