Okay, you’re right about the need to open each individual page. That sucks. I never really went that route, so I wasn’t aware of how cumbersome it became. I get all the audiobooks from the Mises section on iTunes U. Yeah, you need iTunes (or some kind of effective client), but it’s a hell of a lot easier than downloading manually.
One of the things I think would be a nice addition would be to actually have a link to the audiobook from the resource page. So for example, I went to the main site and pretended like I was new and just browsing. I clicked on the literature section, then used the search feature in that section, which, it appears has now been fixed (did not work before). So Ethics of Liberty came up and I clicked, and was taken to the resources page, which is now called the “document” page which includes links to all the incarnations of the text…except for the audiobook. If I was a newbie, I wouldn’t even know an audiobook was available. I never understood why such a link wasn’t included.
I suppose it largely had to do with the book being in the form of several different files, and there was no way to have just a single download link for the whole book. But still, that’s no reason to not have some kind of notice that the audio exists and is available for download on the site. This is part of the reason I did all the work I did in gathering and presenting the links relevant to each book on the Mises Wiki. Obviously there’s not yet a wiki page for each book in the online library, but I was able to create quite a few. (Keep in mind there are sub-categories within that one containing more titles).
Which, the Mises Wiki brings up another example. That thing is almost entirely the result of basically three people…none of whom are employed or in any way officially associated with the institute. Virtually every single one of the more than 1000 articles was created and expanded by less than 5 people. Almost every template, which provides a great deal of behind the scenes backbone functionality of the wiki, was created solely by me. I’m not looking for praise here, I’m just pointing out that if a small handful of community members had not taken it upon themselves to build something there and volunteer their hours to improve it, it would almost certainly look a lot like the “new community”.
And we were doing it with virtually no assistance from any of the development team. Anytime an issue arose or we came across something that needed to be changed or corrected, or found an extention that would improve the functionality of the wiki, it would sometimes literally take months before we even got a response from a site admin who had permissions to make those kind of background changes. Months.
And this persists to this day. Of course, as usual, when project started, Tucker was all about it. It was the next big thing, it was awesome and the potential was limitless. It got brought online, and then was essentially immediately abandoned. Even Dick Clark seemed to almost disappear right away, and never seemed to make any real contribution to the project (at least not a visible one, anyway).
I would like to know why. The only thing I can figure is the team of “brilliant web developers” consists of less than 5 people, all of whom likely have other gigs and aren’t as concerned with all of this as one might think they would be. And I’m not saying they aren’t doing anything, because it’s obvious Veksler always has a Mises project of some kind in the works, and BK seems to be doing behind the scenes work a decent amount of time. But the impression I get is that they have a few overall directives and maybe every now and then get a request from the leadership or have a meeting about trying to implement something new, and they try to do some work on that, but are pretty much left to handle everything how and when they can…and if there’s a problem with or a request made about something they don’t really participate in or care much about, it just for the most part gets ignored (which, again was literally admitted in quote above.)