Mises.org content on DVD

Miscellaneous General
1

My partner and I have been preparing a DVD with (what I hope is) most of the content from Mises.org! We have been working with Jeff Tucker on this, and it is almost ready to offer for sale.

In the next week or two, it will be available for order from our website, Data Prospecting.com.

The DVD will contain almost all of the pdf documents for all the Books and Journals. Besides this, it will have some of the books, some of the journals, all of Mises Review, all of The Free Market, and all of the Daily Articles, in the Folio Views format. This is software designed specifically for electronic publishing of large text collections, with searching tools way beyond what Google or other internet search engines can do for a specific library like this.

Here is our official advertising blurb:

The Mises Digital Library delivers the books, articles, and journals from the mises.org web site to your computer. Using the Folio Views software, this library will help you browse, search, annotate, and study the writings of Ludwig von Mises, Murray N. Rothbard, and all the other authors from the mises.org web site.

The Folio Views search engine supports many more options than web searches can. It can help you search by author, book, chapter, or even down to a single paragraph for a specific phrase or words. It supports boolean, phrase, proximity, word stem, and synonym searching. You can customize the text by adding your own jump links, notes and highlighters. A dynamic table of contents shows the current location in the database, and even how many hits per branch there are from your current search. It allows you to choose which books, authors, or articles to search. When doing a search, the number of hits are reported instantly, as you type.

The database is divided into 4 sections: (1) books, (2) journals, (3) Daily Articles, and (4) a comprehensive index by author, subject, book title, journal article title, and Daily Article title.

Whether you want to take the mises.org web site with you on your commute, or searching for new articles about an interesting topic, this product will help you do it.

Please see this page for a complete listing of the books and articles found on the disk. Produced by Data Prospecting, in coordination with the Mises Institute.

We are shooting for a price of about $20, plus a modest shipping fee.

Once again, we have been working with the Mises Institute to prepare this DVD. This is authorized by them. Eventually, we hope that they will carry it on the mises.org store, but for now, you need to order it from our website, and we will offer product support through our support forum.

If you have any questions, reply here, or on Data Prospecting’s support forum, and I’ll try to answer as soon as I can.

Ryan

2

Sweet. I’ll probably get one.

3

This is now available for order here: http://www.dataprospecting.com/products.html

Feel free to ask any questions about it.

4

Sounds like a very good idea. Thank you for the effort. Will the DVD also include the audio and video files?

5

Can you purchase it at mises.org?

6

I’d put the price and specify what OS it uses, directly on the product page.

7

For now, the pdfs take up about 4.2GB of disk space, and so it just fits on a single layer DVD.

If I have to cross over to a dual layer disks, then I might include the audio files, but the video files would be too big to fit on there.

8

I worked with Jeff Tucker when I was putting this all together, with the goal of having it up on the mises.org web store. Unfortunately, when it was all done, Jeff and Lew opted not to put it up on the mises.org web store (product support was one issue I remember they mentioned). They gave me full permission to market and sell it myself (as I am doing here) and depending on demand, they might reconsider their decision and add it later.

If you would like to email Jeff about it, having a few requests for it in the store might help them change their minds.

Ryan

9

Where’s the bittorrent link?

One could always try “wget --mirror http://mises.org -o /tmp/dvd && mkisofs -o mises.iso /tmp/dvd”

I kid, i kid…don’t try that, it wouldn’t work.

10

I’ve tried the free version of Camtasia to do a screencast of how the Folio Views software looks and works, but the avi seems to be non-standard.

Does anyone have a suggestion for software to create a screecast? I like the output of Jing, but it’s got a questionable future. Any other suggestions?

Ryan

11

Viva la Revolution…

Don’t know about winders, some of these programs might have a port though.

12

Some people have asked if it will work on Linux. I just tested it on Kubuntu 8.04 on x86 hardware, and it loaded and worked just fine. The base font was a bit ugly, but that’s up to Wine and the installed fonts.

Ryan

13

Thanks for the link. I’ll try Wink on Windows for now. My linux box is so underpowered (Via C3) that it can’t even handle a vnc session to it.

Ryan

14

Please buy this! I would love reports on the user experience. We might carry it on Mises.org but we really really need to know how it goes. So yes, have a look. I was blown away when they sent me the disk, very impressed. But of course we have to be fully responsible for what we sell and our concern was simply that this is a beta release – not that I have any evidence of that.

In any case, it is a good product and we really could use a test and help.

15

Ok, I bought one. 1-2 weeks for Int’l.

16

I put the 1-2 weeks in there to be safe, but it might only take a few days. I’ll try to get it shipped tomorrow. Please let me know when you get it so I can better estimate the shipping time.

Ryan

17

Okie Dokie.

18

Just a note, I have put up 2 videos now showing what Folio Views looks like, and how it’s used. The first one is a bit longer (around 13 minutes), while the second one is just on searching, and is about 5minutes.

http://www.dataprospecting.com/features.html

19

You can now download all the PDF and media files on mises.org directly from http://mises.org/books/ and http://media.mises.org/

20

I’ve included the pdf’s on the DVD as a convenience, but the purpose of the DVD is to search, study, annotate, and filter through as much of the html content on the website, as well as converting some of the pdf files to the Folio Views format as well.

Unfortunately, the google search of mises.org leaves a lot to be desired. It’s just the current limits of the engine.

With the software on this DVD, you can limit your search to a single author across books, journal articles, Daily Articles, etc, for example. You can search just the 2007 Daily articles (if you remember a certain article from that year). You can limit your search to just your own notes that you have added yourself to the material.

These are things you just can’t do with a google search.

Ryan