Chapter 27, Books, Online and Off. March 22nd, 2004.
Many people find themselves mystified as to why the Mises Institute puts books online for free that it is also trying to sell.
For example, here is Llewellyn H. Rockwell Jr.'s Speaking of Liberty.
Here is Hans-Hermann Hoppe's The Myth of National Defense, which you can also purchase.
And the most accessed of all, Ludwig von Mises Human Action in many different formats with
an interactive index, even as the Offline Scholars edition remains a bestseller on Mises.org.
Below is a detailed account of how we arrived at the policy that as many books as possible
should be made available online and offline, and why we think it would be a good idea for
all publishers to do the same.
Of course, Amazon.com has slowly come to this policy as well, and no one watches the relationship
between information and sales as closely.
At this point, they are limited only by a publisher's reluctance to let go.
And here we are speaking of new books and issues of marketing and sales.
The case for making older volumes fully available for purposes of education is even more obvious.
The point is to expand the market and not assume a fixed number of consumers.
Books online and offline reinforce the viability of each other just as movies and theaters
boost movies and rental, and free radio helps the market for CDs for purchase.
It takes some thought and entrepreneurial judgment to understand why, but the history
of technological development informs the case.
As one commentator put it on the Mises blog,
Nor did ideas written down in scrolls or illuminated manuscripts undermine the teachers, gurus,
nor did knowledge in mass printed books undermine schools, colleges.
The topic comes up because two weeks ago the Mises Institute released Man Economy and State
with Power and Market, by far our most time consuming and expensive publication project
in our 22 year history.
At $50, this hardbound, 1,550-page treatise on economics is an incredible bargain, but
still expensive for any book.
At the same time, the Mises Institute released a page with the full text of the book and
table of contents and PDF to accomplish the step-by-step development of the full text
in HTML.
A number of readers commented that they believed this policy was generous but essentially nuts
and helpfully advised us that if we knew what was good for sales, we would take down this
page immediately.
Rather than take it down, it is our hope that people will put it in their favorites list
and forward it far and wide.
As a non-profit dedicated to getting the word out about Austrian economics and serving many
people in the world who are interested in learning, it only makes sense that we pursue
every viable means of doing so.
To have the means of providing something as powerful as this book for free and not do
so would amount to deliberately withholding the product pending payment from people who
may or may not have the means of paying.
That prospect of withholding ideas when it would be easy to make them available has to
make every non-profit that cares about its mission somewhat squeamish.
There is nothing wrong with making a profit, but if that were the sole purpose and if doing
If doing so was financially viable, there would be no point in the non-profit structure
that has existed since the ancient world.
For more on non-profits as a market institution, see Rothbard's The Myth of Neutral Taxation.
We gladly offer these texts at no charge simply because we believe that this is part of our
core mission.
If that sounds implausibly high-minded, there are other considerations at work.
There was much confusion in the early days of the web about whether online viewing would
displace books. It didn't happen. In fact, the broad development of the web as a vehicle
for commercial search and delivery has actually led to a boom in book sales, both new and
used. Also, experience suggests that online and offline books are different goods that
serve different purposes. Quick reference versus deep reading, quote checking versus
What's more, these different purposes are complementary. On and offline books are complements, like bacon and eggs, not substitutes like bacon and sausage.
All of this means that one does not necessarily cut into one's sales by offering the book online for free.
for free. By showing people what is inside the book, it is possible to increase sales
of the offline book. The very existence of the online version means that the offline
version becomes more valuable because now one can copy and paste quotations, easily refer
back to the passage, even when the book is not in hand, or send URLs around to friends
or post them on the blog to make points. These days, if a book is not online, it faces
Mises is an additional hurdle that it otherwise would not face. Not substitutes or compliments, but tied goods, like piano strings and keys.
Here is a case in point. For some years, Misesians have wondered about the status of Mises's wonderful book, Omnipotent Government, 1944.
It was the first and still remains the most masterful study of the economics and politics
of German National Socialism, perhaps the most anti-Nazi book published in its time.
It demonstrates that the Nazi ideology was a species of orthodox socialist theory and
thereby corrects one of the most pervasive political errors of our time, that Nazism
Communism and Communism represent opposite sides of an ideological continuum.
In any case, the point is that the book has long deserved far more attention than it has
received.
When it first appeared in 1944 from Yale University Press, reviewers saw it as a classic and expected
it to have a huge impact.
But many on the left and right had every reason to make sure Mises' book did not achieve
For years, we wanted to do something to correct for this. Meanwhile, however, the current publisher would not allow the text to be put online through the Mises Institute. Many of Mises' books have been online and, as a result, were being referred to and quoted and discussed and purchased as never before. But not Omnipotent Government. It was not getting the attention it deserved and, indeed, faced the prospect of forever living in poverty.
in the shadows of those books that are online. After three years of letters, emails, and phone
calls, we finally persuaded the publisher to let us go ahead. But we could only do so on the condition
that we compensate the publisher in advance for all the lost sales they were sure that they would
absorb. Their attitude is somewhat understandable. They figured, why would anyone buy the book now
What happened was precisely the reverse of what the publisher expected.
Instead of lost sales, the sales of the book shot up.
In a few weeks since the text went online, more copies of this book lay out.
This was the first time the book had been sold online.
What up? In a few weeks since the text went online, more copies of this book left our
warehouse than during the whole of the last decade. Omnipotent Government is now a top
seller in the Mises.org catalogue. The publisher not only obtained the leasing fee from our
offices but suddenly enjoyed a flood of new orders for the book from us.
Most gratifying is how quickly ideas are disseminated in these times.
Already commentators and bloggers have noted the parallel between the modern protectionist
argument about outsourcing and the same arguments made by Nazi protectionists of the 1930s,
citing Mises' study in particular.
In only two weeks of being made available, the book and its arguments went from being
This experience illustrates the point very nicely that those who cling to copyright as
a way of denying people knowledge are just wrong.
The same events repeated themselves with Mises' book, Bureaucracy.
Here is a book that offers a tremendously revealing analytical framework for understanding
the public sector.
explains why government is inefficient, why it never seems to have enough money, why budget
cuts seem arbitrary, and why there is no real way to know whether government is doing anything
socially valuable or not. His analysis applies whether the bureaucrats in question are public
spirited or not. It is a very powerful work, and yet it has long been obscured by the public
Choice School's insights on the public sector, which, however valid, are not as foundational
as Mises.
In any case, the book no longer lives in obscurity.
It can again be part of the living debate of our times.
Why isn't the case for making these texts available more obvious?
Part of the error at work here is having an unnecessarily restricted view of the potential
If you believe that they are bought only by a small group of libertarians or Misesians whom you have known from the various conferences in the past, or you believe that the number of Misesians will always be restricted to a tiny remnant, you might believe that you must configure offerings in a way that somehow traps these people into purchasing the product.
But when you realize that the market for libertarian Misesian books has been vastly underestimated and artificially restricted due to technological considerations, it is easy to see that an online text does great good on its own as an educational tool.
The market for Misesian theory delivered via whatever means one can conjure up is not fixed, but rather potentially enormous.
It is just a matter of getting the word out. We are hard at work doing this on other Mises
texts as well, and putting up as many books as we can manage on a daily and weekly basis.
Ludwig von Mises, Murray and Rothbard, Frank Feder, Fritz Machlup, Frank Choteroff, George
Reisman, Hans-Hermann Hoppe, David Gordon, among many others. When possible, we like
We like to offer full text and a searchable and copyable PDF, which means more than just pumping the text through a scanner.
Of course, time and resources constrain us, making a searchable PDF not a snap.
A quality HTML driven by a database takes even more time and money to pay for server space.
In any case, we try to make texts available whether the book was published yesterday or
whether it is long out of print and insofar as rights holders cooperate.
This strategy makes sense to us both in terms of our educational obligations as well as
our fiduciary responsibilities, doing good and doing well, or at least not going broke
tomorrow.
As with all exchanges undertaken on a voluntary basis, everyone wins.