Fwd: Comment about the website

[David Veksler]

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: John Zube <jz...@acenet.com.au>
Date: Thu, Feb 18, 2010 at 11:56 PM
Subject: Comment about the website
To: webm...@mises.org

Dear Webmaster,

                                I just downloaded and copied into my free banking and monetary freedom bibliography many of the titles in your guide on money/banking. Or added merely: Online at the Mises Institute, if they were already included in my list.

 

I noticed there numerous double entries and many of the German words are spelled wrongly. E.g. Ferlag instead of Verlag.

This site should thus be revised.

Thus the total count of references should also be revised.

 

I pointed out some of these mistakes in my list and could send you the list when it is finally finished, as far as I can finish it.

Presently, it comes to 297 pages. Zipped it will still be manageable as an email attachment.  It may end up three times as long as my Free Banking bibliography of 1990, with about 124 pages. Others would have to take it further.

 

I also find your arrangement unclear. At least in my download the titles were not sufficiently separated from each other.

Sometimes merely the full stop at the end is missing.

 

Like in speech the pauses, so in texts the gaps are of significance. On paper one would like to save space, if possible. But electronic space is almost unlimited.

 

At least once the publisher got into the wrong column.

 

Prior publication dates should be given, if known.

 

A really careful look would find more mistakes than I noted.

 

But, nevertheless, thanks for your compilation and the many hints I found useful.

 

So far I went only through the first of the 3 pages of hints on money and banking, necessary for my present bibliographical compilation.

 

I am looking forward to browsing through the 74 pages of hints to libertarian writings offered online.

 

I prepared a somewhat similar list of electronically offered  libertarian titles, which is on www.panarchy.org/zube/list.index.html  Unfortunately, this site is not frequented as much as yours is and thus has grown only very slowly through further input, mainly hints Gian Piero de Bellis put in himself or that I did pass on to him, occasionally for entry on his website. On www.panarchy.org Gian Piero de Bellis has, recently, well summarized my latest book, which is not very well written and arranged and considered by me only as a work in progress - - if I ever get around to finish it. My two libertarian peace books disappeared with the Butterbach.net last August - apart from being recorded on the web archive. I would also like them to appear somewhere for downloading and comments, preferably on a good and relatively popular libertarian website like yours.

 

In the above-mentioned list there are also some other libertarian books that I digitized, with copyrights owned by me or expired and no copyrights claimed by me.

Although they do not |"toe" the Mises line, when it comes to money and crisis explanations, you might like to include them in your general libertarian electronic reference library and could offer them also for free downloading.

 

Probably both lists should be combined, on the road towards an electronic comprehensive libertarian library.

 

You are already largely practising what Chris Anderson last year offered very successfully free online and in bookform: FREE, the Future of a Radical Price.

With the free electronic version as advertising, one can (no guaranty - but then one does not have to continue with the free offer!) get many more buyers for the printed book editions, too, and that at much less advertising expense.

Even the books presently counted as bestsellers have usually only reached a small fraction of the world population.

Most of our potential readers could be reached by electronic editions but are too poor to buy the printed ones. Even the postage and packing charges which would have to be levied for them would already be asking too much from them.

 

But imagine offering all freedom books on a single 1 TB external disc! Then, like early in the 19th century, some people, who could not afford on their own to buy a book costing one or several pounds,  might subscribe together, in underdeveloped countries, to acquire such a reference library between them. The astonishing thing is, that although it might come to contain over 3 million freedom books or equivalent pages, if that many were ever written, it is only sized like a single book and priced, for the hardware, only like 2 or 3 currently printed and properly bound books. 

 

PIOT, John Zube

 

Panarchy In Our Time or: To each the government or non-governmental society of his or her choice!