An offline survival library is a folder of official documents you can read without internet. The safe way to build one is to start with what each source allows you to keep and pass on. Most US federal documents are not protected by copyright inside the US, so they make a solid core. WHO, Hesperian and Red Cross material is free to read but comes with limits on sharing. The text itself is small: our 24-passage test library was 7 KB, and a large one of about 30,000 pages comes to about 90 MB.
What belongs in the library
Choose documents for the questions you will have in the first days of an outage. How much water do we need? Is the food safe? How do I treat this injury? Prefer official sources, because you can see who wrote them and when.
For survival basics, the US Army's ATP 3-50.21 (2018) states that it is approved for public release. Our guide to the Army survival manual PDF explains which edition to keep. For water, Ready.gov and the CDC set the rule behind our emergency water calculator, and the USDA covers food, which is what our power outage food timer uses. Health and first aid is where the Red Cross, WHO and Hesperian come in, and each has conditions.
Add local pages too: your city's emergency plan, your utility's outage line and the phone numbers you would need. No general library can supply those.
Commercial books are different. Unless a book says otherwise, assume you need the publisher's permission before copying or sharing it.
Public domain, free to read, or permission needed
Start with the law. Section 105 of the US Copyright Act says that copyright protection "is not available for any work of the United States Government". That is why the Army manual and most federal web pages can be copied.
The rule has edges, and the agencies list them. The CDC says some of its resources and images were developed by government contractors or grantees, or licensed from a third party. It adds that works of state and local governments may be protected by copyright. FEMA says it sometimes uses photos or graphics that are restricted, so look for a credit. The EPA warns that individual documents may have different copyright conditions.
There is a further catch for anyone outside the US. The CDC notes that US federal copyright law may not protect US government works abroad, where local law can still apply.
Free to read is a different thing from free to share. WHO publishes under a Creative Commons licence that excludes commercial use and asks for permission for commercial uses. The Red Cross lets you download items for personal, non-commercial use only. Hesperian's Where There Is No Doctor encourages copying for non-commercial purposes, with credit, but asks you to get permission first for commercial purposes, for more than 100 print copies, for any digital format, or for an organization with a budget above US$1 million.
Here is how each source describes itself, as read on 23 October 2026.
| Source | What its own page says | Keep a copy | Hand out copies |
|---|---|---|---|
| ATP 3-50.21 (Army) | Approved for public release; distribution is unlimited | Yes | Yes |
| FEMA and Ready.gov | Most material is free of copyright | Yes | Yes, except photos or graphics credited to others |
| CDC | Not subject to copyright, in the public domain | Yes | Yes, if you meet its conditions below |
| EPA | Freely distributed for non-commercial, scientific and educational purposes | Yes | Non-commercial only |
| Wikipedia | Mostly CC BY-SA 4.0 | Yes | Yes, with credit and the same licence |
| WHO | CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 IGO | Yes | Non-commercial only; ask for anything else |
| Hesperian | Open Copyright License, with a permission list | Yes | Ask first for digital copies or large print runs |
| Red Cross | Personal, non-commercial use only | Yes, for yourself | No wider permission stated |
The Hesperian row deserves care. Its permission list includes any digital format, so if you plan to put the book on a drive that other people will receive, ask Hesperian first. We have not asked on your behalf.
What the CDC asks of you
The CDC attaches the most detailed conditions of the agencies here. You credit the agency, show a disclaimer that your use does not imply endorsement, leave the substantive content unchanged, and state that the material is otherwise available on the agency website for no charge.
It also prefers links to copies. Sites that re-post its pages often fail to check for updates, which may result in out-of-date information. If you keep a copy, write down the date you saved it and check back.
Formats and sizes
Three file types cover nearly everything. PDFs keep the look of the original. Plain text is the smallest and easiest to search. ZIM files are what Kiwix uses for offline copies of whole websites.
Pictures drive the size, not words. Our check of the official ATP 3-50.21 PDF found 23,772,309 bytes over 228 pages, but only 589,624 bytes of text. That fits our rule of thumb of about 2.5 to 3 KB of text per page. By our sizing notes, a small library of about 2,000 pages is about 5 MB of text, and a large one of about 30,000 pages is about 90 MB, plus 2 to 5 GB if you keep pictures and drawings.
Kiwix describes itself as a nonprofit making free knowledge accessible where the Internet is not, and says its Reader app and content are free to download, free to use and free of advertising. Its download listing shows how big Wikipedia gets. At the time of writing the English Wikipedia with pictures is 119G, the version without pictures is 49G and the mini version is 13G, where G means gigabytes. Its download site also holds small topic files, such as one on water at 20M.
Kiwix also offers a Preppers bundle, an image of 200GB. It lists the complete English Wikipedia, Ready.gov planning guides, and military medicine and first aid resources, and it is offered pre-installed on a Kiwix Hotspot. A bundle mixes many licences in one box. Wikipedia's text is mostly under a share-alike licence, which is not the same as the government sources above, so check each part before you hand a drive to anyone.
Keeping the library trustworthy
Keep a plain list next to the files: title, web address, the date you saved it and the licence wording you relied on. When an agency republishes a guide, that list shows you what is out of date.
Print the pages you cannot afford to lose, such as the water guide, the first-aid pages and your local numbers. A printed page needs no battery. Keep a second copy of the whole folder somewhere other than your laptop.
What we could not confirm
We could not confirm a current official download of FEMA's "Are You Ready?" guide, so we do not link one. We did not check the licences of Kiwix's small topic files, so check before you share them. This page reports what each source says about itself, it is not legal advice, and terms change.
We're building Waystone, an offline survival assistant that is still in development, around a library of official pages like these. That is why we start from sources whose own terms allow reuse.