Buy Lantern

What's in the library

Every Blackout Library carries this list on the device itself, with the version date and license of each collection. We only ship material we are licensed to distribute or that is in the public domain, and we credit its authors.

On the Lantern (and everything above it)

  • Wikipedia, every article in English, with images. Text by Wikipedia contributors, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0.
  • Maps of the whole United States: roads, trails, towns, rivers and hospitals, searchable by place name. Map data from OpenStreetMap contributors, Open Database License.
  • WikEM, the emergency medicine reference written for clinicians (CC BY-SA), the Kiwix medical library, U.S. military medicine handbooks (public domain) and Medical Sciences Q&A (CC BY-SA).
  • Preparedness packs assembled by the Kiwix project: After a disaster, Water, Knots, Food. Open licenses.
  • Stack Exchange communities on home improvement, electronics, the outdoors, gardening and amateur radio. Contributions under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0.
  • Wikibooks and Wiktionary, open textbooks and the dictionary (CC BY-SA).
  • Project Gutenberg, the science, technology, agriculture and medicine shelves: thousands of public-domain books.
  • The six Right now guides (bleeding, CPR, water, shelter, hypothermia, poisoning), written for this device from CDC, FEMA, Stop the Bleed, American Heart Association and U.S. Army first-aid sources, with those sources credited on each page.
  • Your documents: the manuals and papers you add yourself, from a phone or a USB stick, read into the same search and quoted by the assistant on Signature and Vault. They stay on the device.

Adding to it. With the Ethernet port in your home router, the settings page shows the Kiwix catalogue: hundreds of collections in English (and Wikipedia in other languages), with sizes, dates and licenses, and newer builds of what is already on the unit. Pick one and it downloads onto the card; nothing on the unit ever needs the internet to be read.

Added on Signature (30 collections, 588 GB)

  • Wikivoyage and Wikiversity (CC BY-SA)
  • The complete Project Gutenberg library, every shelf, more than 70,000 public-domain books
  • Seven more Stack Exchange communities: cooking, sustainability, bicycles, pets, physics, chemistry, biology (CC BY-SA)
  • Learn: Khan Academy (English, U.S. curriculum) through Kolibri, the offline learning platform: about 18,000 lesson videos and 9,000 practice exercises from counting to calculus, physics, chemistry, biology, economics and history, with progress kept for each person in the house. Khan Academy's lessons are CC BY-NC-SA; we are arranging their permission to ship them pre-loaded
  • The Library Assistant, which answers questions from the device's own pages and your documents and shows you the passages it used; works sums, percentages, conversions and equations out exactly; and points learning questions at the lesson to start with

Planned for Vault

  • Wikipedia in Spanish, French, German and Chinese, with images
  • World maps
  • Every Stack Exchange community
  • Open-access medical research from PubMed Central (Creative Commons Attribution articles)

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 are 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.