Staying alive...

I've been working on the CCEL for some 13 years now, and it's grown and evolved considerably--from nothing, to a couple of books on an FTP site, to a growing web site, to a digital library with 650 XML books, receiving receiving 6 million page views a month.

It has been rewarding and tiring, fulfilling and demanding. Over the years, there have been times when I have felt burnt out, and I've always had way too much work to do in too little time. There have been times when I was nearly ready to quit.

Currently, the CCEL is funded by private donations, sales of CD-ROMs, and lots of volunteer labor. I would love to see the CCEL as a self-sustaining, lasting project, with a couple of full-time people to run it -- maybe even improve it. So, I'm going to try to make the project self-sustaining by asking more explicitly for donations when users download PDF files and other special formats. There won't be any such requests when users read HTML versions of books on the web.

God willing, this approach will continue to allow all books and formats to be available free and yet provide for the long-term stability and improvement of the site -- if enough users choose to contribute. If not, our projections suggest that adding some advertisements may provide enough revenue to keep the project running and addressing its mission of building up the church.

What do you think? Is this project worth sustaining and growing? Is the suggested donations approach OK, or is it too annoying? Would you rather see advertising? Or a subscription requirement for use of advanced site capabilities?

Harry Plantinga
Director, CCEL