Richard Dawkins’ books will be open access soon. He wants them to be free for people. Interestingly, if you look at the Arabic translations of the book The God Delusion, it has been downloaded 13 million times.

There are people in Muslim-majority countries, apparently, with a need for the taste of atheism. People want atheism. They want science education. They want all of this from Richard Dawkins’ books.

Dawkins’ organization, the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science, merged, recently, with the Center for Inquiry. There are plans ongoing in order to advertise the translations and spreading  Richard Dawkins’ writing around the world for those that are questioning their faith or for those who have lost it.

Dawkins said that he has had a tremendous amount of encouragement from these developments, especially as he has heard in an earlier time that digital or PDF versions of the book were downloaded inside of the Islamic Republic of Iran.

Dawkins, based on reportage from Hemant Mehta, will have the books provide in Arabic, Farsi, Indonesian, and Urdu. The books with legally translated editions cannot be offered as PDFs. Nonetheless, those books without his own stamp of approval and not released by the local publishers will get his stamp of approval.

For an author to give away some of his most prized books, most purchased and read books – that have reached literally millions of people, Mehta claims is “unheard of.” Dawkins does this for two reasons: one, get people interested in science; two, have people turn away from religion, likely.

Photo Credits: Strange Notions