(Semi-)Official Mises.org EPUB Release Topic

[Tex2002ans]

Over the past year, I have been converting EPUBs in my spare time for the Mises Institute. I started my EPUB journey initially, because of the poor state I noticed Mises EPUBs were in. There were many typos, and overall design decisions which made me quite frustrated (bloated images, bloated files, embedded fonts, HUGE margins, etc.). Coming from a coding background, I see all of these mistakes as bloat/bugs, which must be fixed.

I also wanted to get as many books as possible into EPUB format, because it is so much more enjoyable to read the books on ANY device, and in any font size and/or font you prefer. EPUB also has the advantage of being convertible into any other format easily (for example, if you have a Kindle).

Because of my continual EPUB output/emails (annoyances ), in ~October 2012, I was put in touch directly with Brandon Hill ((the Store Manager at LvMI), he is in charge of running the Mises store, Amazon sales, and many other important duties). Since October 2012, I have begun working extremely closely with LvMI, and started to get more and more of my EPUBs in the Literature section.

As of today, I will officially be working on EPUBs for LvMI.

I wanted to create this thread as a one stop shop for all of my WIP EPUBs, instead of me flooding many of the other EPUB topics with my posts.

All of the EPUBs in this topic will be posted when I complete everything on my end (covers/eISBNs are handled on LvMI’s end, and I output things too quickly for them to keep up with. ). If you want beautiful fancy covers? Feel free to wait until they are on the Literature section, for all those who want to read the actual text? Read my versions.

Feel free to post requests in this topic as well, I take them into consideration, and can/will add them to my list to work on in my spare time.

All of my work can also be found at my site (link can be found in my signature).

If you find any typos in ANY of the books (PDF/EPUB/Physical), please report it in this topic, the “Book Typos” topic, or the “Book Typos” Wiki article:

https://forum.freecapitalists.org/t/book-typos/23377/5

https://wiki.freecapitalists.org/wiki/MisesWiki:Typos

Every single typo that can be caught/fixed is a HUGE help.

As a side note, if anyone wants to help with hosting these elsewhere, I would be very grateful. As of now, I rely on filesharing sites (Mediafire was my favorite), but these are extremely unreliable due to the DMCA (my Mediafire account became suspended, and all of my links have been deleted). Please get in contact with me privately through email, Mises PMs, or leave me contact information as a comment on my site.

There is also the case of some gray area copyrights on some PDFs on Mises.org. If I do work on these books, they are in no way sanctioned by LvMI, and I work on these in my spare time to make more enjoyable versions for everyone to read.

[manfred]

Keep up the great work, Tex!

[John_James]

You are freaking awesome. That’s it. Just awesome. Everyone owes you a debt of intense gratitude for all this work. Who knows how many minds have been influenced thanks to their downloading of one of your files.

Please keep it up.

P.S.

Did you ever create one for Against Intellectual Monopoly?

[Phi_est_aureum]

^This.

Seriously, you’re a badass and I am grateful for your willingness to do this work!

[Tex2002ans]

@Peter Sidor

Keep up the great work, Tex!

I shall!

@John James

You are freaking awesome. That’s it. Just awesome. Everyone owes you a debt of intense gratitude for all this work. Who knows how many minds have been influenced thanks to their downloading of one of your files.

Thank you for the very kind words, they really help. And I have also been getting a lot of kind words from Brandon and the rest of the Mises crew (I even hear that Lew Rockwell himself is now aware of the poor state the EPUBs were in… hence approving my hiring for more EPUB work).

@John James

Did you ever create one for Against Intellectual Monopoly?

No response. Tonight I will retype another email, perhaps it got lost in David Levine’s spam folder or was overlooked?

@Phi est aureum

Seriously, you’re a badass and I am grateful for your willingness to do this work!

Hope everyone is enjoying reading them. It is a pleasure getting all these books out there to read, and allowing the text/ideas to live forever in any future book formats.

Everyone else should help too with reporting typos. I am only one human, and I cannot read every book in depth.

I have a lot of automated fixes to catch the most common errors, and I do a few passes through each book in order to Quality Check, but tiny mistakes may sometimes slip through.

[Tex2002ans]

I just posted these 7 books to my site (these have been completed for a very long time, but I was waiting for my Mediafire situation to be fixed):

Bourne,Randolph.-.The.State
Chamberlin,William.Henry.-.Collectivism.-.A.False.Utopia
Curtiss,W.M.-.The.Tariff.Idea
Groseclose,Elgin.-.Money.And.Man
Hazlitt,Henry.-.Illusions.of.Point.Four
Palyi,Melchior.-.An.Inflation.Primer
Palyi,Melchior.-.Compulsory.Medical.Care.And.The.Welfare.State

I also am in the process of working on these books for Mises (just some tiny tweaks, should be up in Literature section soon):

Hayek,Friedrich.A.-.Individualism.And.Economic.Order
Mises,Ludwig.von.-.Economic.Policy.-.Thoughts.For.Today.And.Tomorrow

And I am currently OCRing this book (everyone BETTER read this EPUB, it is a huge pain in the butt and is a lot of work. ):

Brusciani-Turroni,Constantino.-.The.Economics.of.Inflation

@John James

P.S.

Did you ever create one for Against Intellectual Monopoly?

This is the answer I got from David a few days ago:

@David Levine

Unfortunately on the subject of the burden of copyright there is an issue with producing an EPUB version: we don’t hold the copyright, Cambridge University Press does. If we had it to do all over again, we wouldn’t do it that way, but while our agreement allows us to provide it online as PDF for free, it doesn’t allow for conversion and redistribution. I’m copying Michele to see what he thinks and whether there is something we might do.

Hopefully something can be done, but I doubt they will allow a free EPUB.

[John_James]

@Tex2002ans

@John James

P.S. Did you ever create one for Against Intellectual Monopoly?

This is the answer I got from David a few days ago:

@David Levine

Unfortunately on the subject of the burden of copyright there is an issue with producing an EPUB version: we don’t hold the copyright, Cambridge University Press does. If we had it to do all over again, we wouldn’t do it that way, but while our agreement allows us to provide it online as PDF for free, it doesn’t allow for conversion and redistribution. I’m copying Michele to see what he thinks and whether there is something we might do.

Hopefully something can be done, but I doubt they will allow a free EPUB.

I was afraid of something like that. How ridiculous. And it’s quite disappointing they’d actually go through with publishing a book like that…all that work, and handing the copyright over to a major publishing house.

So lame. But like I said David does seem to be very interested in helping however he can, so let’s hope there’s something he can work out. If not, it’s not as if an EPUB version has to be hosted at mises.org or any other such site. I mean if one just happened to make its way out on to the Internet without Cambridge’s sanction, there’s really nothing they could do about it…

[myhumangetsme]

FIrst of all, congratulations. This is a well-deserved hire.

On the topic of freely available books, it’d be nice if we could get some of the online versions of books by Julian Simon into EPUB format. I’d also love to see the books of Richard Mitchell in a quality EPUB format, but as he’s merely a fellow traveler in certain circles it’s a far off wish.

[Tex2002ans]

@John James

I was afraid of something like that. How ridiculous. And it’s quite disappointing they’d actually go through with publishing a book like that…all that work, and handing the copyright over to a major publishing house.

Quite sad, but as David said, hopefully in the future they will NOT handle it that way. Still awaiting the response email from Michele Boldrin… perhaps he will have more insights.

@John James

If not, it’s not as if an EPUB version has to be hosted at mises.org or any other such site.

Well mises.org wouldn’t be able to touch it besides selling the physical book version in their store as they currently do. I don’t have stats or anything, but I bet Against Intellectual Monopoly is probably one of the top sellers. (I believe #1 is Economics In One Lesson by far)… I will have to bother Brandon about some stats.

@John James

I mean if one just happened to make its way out on to the Internet without Cambridge’s sanction, there’s really nothing they could do about it…

Yes yes… something high quality might leak onto somewhere someday somehow.

@myhumangetsme

FIrst of all, congratulations. This is a well-deserved hire.

Thank you. I believe so too.

@myhumangetsme

On the topic of freely available books, it’d be nice if we could get some of the online versions of books by Julian Simon into EPUB format. I’d also love to see the books of Richard Mitchell in a quality EPUB format, but as he’s merely a fellow traveler in certain circles it’s a far off wish.

Yes I know Julian Simon, I keep the RSS of http://www.masterresource.org/ and his book, “The Ultimate Resource”, is always on the left hand side of the page.

It seems to me like many of these books are already in HTML. That shouldn’t be too tough to transfer over to EPUB. I will see what I can do in the coming weeks with a web crawler to pull all those files.

[Tex2002ans]

These EPUBs should be up on Mises soon (grab from my site if you don’t want to wait):

The Economics of Liberty by Lew Rockwell
The Economics of Inflation by Constantino Brusciani-Turroni
Individualism and Economic Order by F.A. Hayek
Economic Policy: Thoughts for Today and Tomorrow by Ludwig von Mises

This one is not on Mises, but it was printed by Liberty Fund (a commenter on my site requested it):

Envy: A Theory of Social Behaviour by Helmut Schoeck

I updated my EPUB slightly of this book:

The Socialist Empire: The Incas of Peru by Louis Baudin

because of this topic: https://forum.freecapitalists.org/t/incan-socialism-some-initial-thoughts/26268

[myhumangetsme]

Fantastic work. “The Economics of Liberty” definitely deserves an epub and “Envy” is Schoeck’s magnum opus.

By the way, I had forgotten to follow up with you, I’ve essentially set any work on Hayek’s “The Counter-Revolution of Science” to the side for work priorities, but the book itself has been pretty thoroughly spell checked and formatted; only work on the footnotes remains. If you’d like I can send you my Word doc and the PDF I was working from to get it to this point, it should be pretty smooth sailing to the finish line I just don’t have the time to get it there.

[z1235]

Tex, thanks again for all the good work and congrats on the well deserved LvMI position!

[Tex2002ans]

@myhumangetsme

By the way, I had forgotten to follow up with you, I’ve essentially set any work on Hayek’s “The Counter-Revolution of Science” to the side for work priorities, but the book itself has been pretty thoroughly spell checked and formatted; only work on the footnotes remains. If you’d like I can send you my Word doc and the PDF I was working from to get it to this point, it should be pretty smooth sailing to the finish line I just don’t have the time to get it there.

Of course. Please send me the PDF and Word document to my email (my username)@gmail.com. I will carry the torch the rest of the way.

@z1235

Tex, thanks again for all the good work and congrats on the well deserved LvMI position!

Thank you, it feels great to get all these books out there.

[myhumangetsme]

Did you receive my emails?

[ClaytonB]

Seriously, you’re a badass and I am grateful for your willingness to do this work!

+1

Clayton -

[Tex2002ans]

@myhumangetsme

Did you receive my emails?

Yes, looks like great work. I will work on it after I finish some of my (secret) side projects.

[Tex2002ans]

Just completed “The Regulated Consumer” by Mary Bennett Peterson. It is up on my site.

Also, the EPUB of “The Economics of Liberty” edited by Lew Rockwell is up officially:

https://mises.org/document/3654/The-Economics-of-Liberty

[Tex2002ans]

@myhumangetsme

By the way, I had forgotten to follow up with you, I’ve essentially set any work on Hayek’s “The Counter-Revolution of Science” to the side for work priorities, but the book itself has been pretty thoroughly spell checked and formatted; only work on the footnotes remains. If you’d like I can send you my Word doc and the PDF I was working from to get it to this point, it should be pretty smooth sailing to the finish line I just don’t have the time to get it there.

Today I focused completely on getting “Counter-Revolution of Science” into EPUB. It is up on my site now.

I found a nice amount of errors in your .doc (mostly missing em dashes, unsuperscripted footnotes, and a nice chunk of minor typos). If you want me to send you a changelog I could do that.

On page 79 I tried to actually figure out what the Greek characters were at the bottom of the page, hopefully this is correct:

ἄνζρωπος ἔστιν ὁ πάντeς ἴδμεν

This is what I was first talking about with Hayek’s books. In his books there always seems to be a lot of these Greek characters/words, and it just takes forever to figure out what the actual characters are, especially with font differences.

[John_James]

Tex2002ans…sent you a PM…did you get it?

[Tex2002ans]

I saw that Kinsella was promoting a Rothbard article from the Libertarian Papers:

http://c4sif.org/2013/04/rothbards-high-tech-crime-a-call-for-papers-1983/

I decided to go take a look back at the Libertarian Forum (wow, was that a MASSIVE project.) The spellchecking tools have gotten much better in Sigil since I edited that EPUB… so I was able to catch hundreds more typos and code mistakes. I also recompressed the images to shave off in total ~48 KBs off the size of the EPUB.

The new EPUB can be found at my site (and should be up on Mises.org soon).

Also, a user requested that I create an EPUB of William Stanley Jevons’s book, “Elementary Lessons in Logic”. The PDF located on Mises.org is ATROCIOUS (horrible artifacting)… so I combined two versions off of archive.org, to create a MUCH BETTER PDF version. I then used this as a basis for the EPUB.

Everything is pretty much complete (I must admit, it is probably the greatest EPUB out there. :P) But there are still a few more tweaks that can be done (I completely ignored the useless backmatter)… The book was a massive amount of work… so I might put it off for a few weeks before looking back at it again (the Greek words in this book took up a MASSIVE amount of time).

As a side note, if anyone knows anyone who reads/types Greek, please get in contact with me. It would be extremely helpful if I ever run into a book again with many Greek words. They can probably convert it way faster than me copying/pasting character by character from Wikipedia (it was very painful).