Now reading Principles of Economics by Mankiw. Starting the chapter called “Thinking Like an Economist.” Here’s the one of the first few things mentioned in the chapter [emphasis mine]:
In other words: there is nothing at all distinctive about how an economist confronts a question versus how any other scientist confronts a question, and “thinking like an economist” is entirely the same as “thinking like a physicist” with only a change in subject matter. But, at the same time, there’s something distinctive about how an economist “confronts a question.”
Well my current job is annotating the margins with rigorous questions and ever so witty commentary at every slip-up. My payment is psychic (measured cardinally in utils, of course; but not really, right?) and, as far as I can tell, these utils can be categorized as such: ego inflation; stress relief, and; the “turning the lemons of a Harvard hack into Austrian lemonade for posterity who may receive this particular book” fund.
On the airplane back from Europe this year I annotated one of the articles on the complimentary magazines about some economist claiming we need some new capitalism that focuses on cooperatives because they’re apparently so much more productive. I ripped the article’s logic up and in numerous places in the magazine I wrote “Read Rothbard” and “Go to Mises.org” and “capitalism is not = corporatism”. I paused before I did this, wondering whether or not I was vandalizing private property, but I realized that the magazine was complimentary, so I could do as I wished. Yes, I pause and even consider these tiny details.
On that note, you might actually consider digitizing it in some way. E-books have the capability to allow the reader to make notes. I’m not completely sure about the specifics of how it works, but I’d hope there’s a way to export them to a file, and share it with others.
In fact that might even be a fun project. Everyone uses the epubs from Mises.org, and makes their notes as they read them. We then upload them to a repository on the site and make them available (through Mises Wiki or the Literature section). Then anyone can download and import them, and read the books along with the notes of anyone here.
thats a really interesting idea. I wonder if its possible.
It would be impressive if there was a community/collective epub file that will allow everyone to comment on a single file rather than have 50 different epubs each with another members notes.
You could have actual mises.org authors/contributors notes appear on top of anyone elses or highlight theirs. Then a ranking system that would push good notes to the top. Similar to a ‘verified answer’ post or it can be based on likeability.
Do you mean those “Common Highlights” that ebooks from Amazon have? There’s a way of highlighting sections and sharing them on the Kindle, but I’ve never done that (not to say that I don’t know how to do it).
I can see myself making PDFs of all the offending pages after acquiring at least access to a scanner and creating a Mises Wiki page of Mankiw’s Principles with the PDFs on the page- and then it’s out there on the 'net. Maybe from there I could share it with I Bet Ludwig von Mises […] on facebook where the moderators could make it avaiable to subscribers. And then the information is … wait,
just found a free file of the fifth edition of the book online. I have the sixth edition, but the differences are probably marginal if any (after a cursory search on google, there are free versions of the 6th edition, but they are divided into individual chapters and are not in one piece). This could change things- maybe screenshots of the pages with text boxes dragged to relevant sections. I’m gonna think of the method to my madness and get back to you on this, John James, but it is a cool idea.
That’s kind of what I was saying…not necessarily a bunch of completely different epubs, but simple “notes” files which could be imported to an epub. Obviously the epub would have to match the one that the notes were made with, but this wouldn’t be a problem since everyone could get the original epub from Mises.org, meaning we could ensure everyone would have the same source text.
Ideally, you could import more than one “notes” file at a time, and have all notes available at once. But I’m almost positive this is not possible. I doubt it’s even possible to export/import notes at all, but if it is, it’s probably through a process that is essentially creating a new epub file as you mentioned.
But yeah, what you describe is what I was talking about. Even though I have virtually no experience with e-readers (links for best ones are here), I’m pretty positive this is not possible (or at least, this functionality hasn’t been developed.) I doubt there’s enough of a demand for it…yet. I wouldn’t be surprised for it to make an appearance though, as e-books become more the norm. They’re already being implemented in colleges and university courses.
It won’t be long before professors are issuing importable notes to go along with the electronic version of the textbook…instead of handouts.
