Our goal is to make all information available to everybody, anytime, for free and to simultaneously allow people to make money off the information.   The effect is to accelerate the rate of progress as a whole on the Internet and among people. But how can this be done for free while meeting the simultaneous goal of moving more money?

In the physical world, libraries and bookstores stably coexist despite the fact that libraries provide for free exactly what the bookstores sell. 

Our solution is similar. We want to provide access to information to everyone, but we provide more convenient access for a fee. We have already proven this is possible. 

In one experiment, with the National Academy Press (www.nap.edu) we put all 1700 (or so) of their published books on the web for full free reading and searching access, but sold hard-copies. The result, as we hoped, were more book sales. 

In another example, we developed www.antiquebooks.net as a method for providing free reading while subsidizing the cost of book digitizing and hosting.

In another system, the Historical New York Times Project with Seagate Technologies, we are making all issues of the Historical New York Times available for free reading but we are charging a subscription to search. 

The individual subscription is a one time fee, much like buying a book, that gives search over all the Historical New York Times web site for the life of the owner of the subscription. The search is full-text search over the Optical Character Recognition results. 

We have automated the processes so that as the Optical Character Recognition technology improves, the search quality will improve. The lifetime fee provides a book that improves, materially, with age. 

Over the years, we have developed a web design methodology, called a fidelity matrix, for designing other sites that may choose to use the Free and Fee model.