A few weeks ago I wrote about how useful it would be to store thousands of books on an e-reader device, such as a Kindle. Surely, this isn’t the first time the idea has been proposed for the prepper community, but it deserves to be mentioned again.

Planning to live without civilization means there will be times when we won’t have access to the skills we need. Society provides an immensely beneficial service to us, in the form of people who are specialized in certain tasks, such as doctors, mechanics, and electricians etc. But despite spending their whole lives practicing these sophisticated skills, even they need to reference a book or a website from time to time.

So for the rest of us who are planning to survive through scenarios that lack these life-saving services, it would be wise to store as many books as we can on a wide variety of subjects, preferably in a portable, digital format.

Fortunately for us, there is a vast surplus of reading material for preppers, and much of it can be had for free. I recently discovered a page from a website called Armageddon Online, that had compiled nearly 3,000 books on a wide range of skills. It seems like there is a preparedness book on just about any subject you can think of including hurricanes, earthquakes, fire, tsunamis, EMP, and nuclear survival

There are also extensive lists of books on wilderness survival, fire building, alternative energy, food storage, gardening, and medical skills. It even lists books on more obscure topics like blacksmithing and radio operation. And that’s just one website. A cursory Google search on “free survival books” will yield dozens of listings and hundreds of other free books.

And as computing technology continues to develop, the ability to store vast amounts of data is going to be a big game changer for preppers. You won’t just be able to store thousands of books, you’ll be able to catalog huge websites and carry them with you wherever you go.

For instance, right now you can download every article from the English speaking section of Wikipedia. A full download takes up about 100GB. If you want that to be portable, you can fit that on a 128GB USB drive for less than 50 bucks. And if there are other websites you want that don’t offer a download, you can use a web crawler like HTTrack to download their articles yourself.

Isn’t that cool? Truly, we live in amazing times. Over the years the internet has proven to be incredibly useful to preppers, by connecting us to like minded people and allowing us to share life saving skills. And now you can download your favorite parts of the internet, and access them separately from the grid.

So take advantage of this technology while you still can. If the grid goes down tomorrow, you’ll be glad you had the foresight to download a vast library of how-to guides and informative websites. Doing so is a great way to educate yourself with life saving skills, even after the SHTF.