A Short History of a Book Publishing Phenom

0:00Well, I noticed that everybody else seems to have a great prop to put up here, and my plan was to put up a copy of Larry Seacrest's book called Free Banking. So I went out to the bookstore to get a copy, and turns out they're all gone. So there is no prop. Larry Seacrest's book came out only about two months ago. It's a crushing attack on central banking. I urge you all to get it. Larry was thrilled to have his book back in print. And it appeared in, I think it was in the late 1980s, something like that, but typically with an academic publishing house that buried it in state university libraries. And so it didn't have a big print run, and it always made me very sad that such a wonderful book couldn't achieve anything like a large distribution.

0:49But thanks to all the innovations we've undergone here, we were able to bring it out about two Two months ago, in a beautiful edition with a captivating cover, and it's been selling like crazy, Larry had been inspired by the appearance of this book and had been sending me all of his scholarly papers to also publish on Mises Org, things that nobody would have seen otherwise really, in these small journals. So they're all hosted on Mises Org. So I was very sad a couple of days ago, phone rang and the person on the other end said Hello, this is Molly Sechrist. And I knew, you know, he had died that morning. So it was a sad moment for us. He was a dear friend of my father's too. But, you know, I've been talking to Molly about this. The fact that we were able to get his book out and get a large distribution and that he was able to see it before his death, you know, he leaves a magnificent legacy. And I thought it was intriguing to walk out in the book

1:53Each year I like to give a round-up of where we stand in terms of publishing and online resources and each year I'm struck by how much progress we've made and this year really I do have lots of astounding facts to share with you. We have 300 books in our catalogue and the overwhelming majority of which have been internally published. We have an online store that's second to none in the world of pro-liberty publishing and this website that delivers 7 terabytes. It's not 6.7, it's 7. Our monthly quota was actually 3. So there's a little button on our server host's website that goes to accounts to see what your monthly bill is. And I haven't pushed it yet. What am I going to do? If it's too large, what am I going to do? Shut down the website or something? I don't know. So we'll Mises, Rothbard, Haslett, Rupka, Hayek, Hutt, Spadaro, Trotterhof, Nock, Garrett, Rompahl, John T. Flynn, Boehm-Bawerk, Menger, Bastiat, Hahn, Say, Vicksel, among many others, in print and available for free download or purchase in hard copy.

3:16We had the complete run of seven journals online, many of which would have otherwise sunk without a trace. And in our own library we have 30,000 rare books, all of which are begging to be scanned and put online. So it's fair to say that the Mises Institute has achieved a level of productivity and effectiveness that none of us would have imagined possible in the past. Well, Mark had mentioned about what 7 terabytes amounts to. I did some further calculation after you spurred me off. I didn't know anybody, everybody didn't know what a terabyte was, but as I began to think about it, I didn't really know what a terabyte was. So I looked it up. It's nearly equivalent to the entire, now this is delivered every month, right, or at least this month, and we hope that we're going to be able to sustain it out of the Mises org. This is total data. Nearly the equivalent to the entire printed collection at the Library of Congress. I've done work at the Library of Congress, and you have to

4:17sit there. Have you ever been to the Library of Congress? You have to fill out a piece of paper and say, well, I want this book. And they say, great, we'll get it to you sometime within the next eight hours. They do say this. And then you have to wait for eight hours, you know, cobwebs on you and everything. And then they bring to you a slip of paper that Sorry sir, it's not in the stacks. Where to go? I don't know, it's not there. Anyway, we hope that this means books that are in the stacks in the Library of Congress. Another way to look at it is that it's 335,000 trees made into paper and printed. And delivering digitally, just think of the glorious things that Mises Org is doing to help the environment. The tree-huggers should just love us. It's our kind of recycling.

5:06So many people drop by and ask how it is that this came to be accomplished. And with all of our endeavors, it's just been a matter of tiny steps taken every day by the staff, along with the willingness of our members and donors to provide financial support through faith and the ideals that the Mises Institute represents. The guiding principle of management here, and I get this question all the time, what is the guiding principle? It can always and everywhere be summed up in a single principle, generosity. The Mises Institute gives as much as it can, as often as it can. That's really it. We've never believed in withholding education. We've never closed these treasures behind locked walls. We've never hesitated to make ideas available to as many people as possible insofar as the technology permits it.

5:52Our focus has never been on growth as such, but rather just simply service. This is a model that Lew Rockwell adopted at the very outset of the Mises Institute. The first book that the Institute published has a very special place in my heart and mind. It was Theory and History by Mises. The Institute published it in 1985 and I somehow got a copy of it in my last year in college and it had a new introduction by Murray Rothbard. The Theory of Money and Credit Really, it shook me to my very foundations. His core argument is for methodological dualism.

6:59It's the idea that a different method of understanding, a different standard of proof applies to the social sciences as versus the natural sciences. He argues for a pure theory as applied to economics, deductive theory as the core of economic reasoning. And he further argues that the great ideological errors of our time, socialism, fascism, racialism, interventionism, Inflationism, legal positivism, historicism, whatever, they all have roots and a refusal to bow to the truths gleaned from economic reasoning. And to read this book was really a mind-blowing experience for anyone who sat through hundreds of hours of lectures in any college. It is utterly and completely transformative. Now I like to imagine how history might have worked itself out in my own life in the absence of this Mises Institute publishing program that brought this book out from obscurity.

7:48In no way I would have seen this book or read it or been challenged by Mises' ideas. In fact, this text and probably many of Mises' other works would have remained in obscurity and this applies to millions of people and thousands of titles. Lew Rockwell had worked at Arlington House Publishers, which was another case of a publisher that charted its own course against the mainstream and Lew had seen the power of Mises' prose. In fact, he had been the editor of several of his books and he was struck by the fact that it was left to this one tiny publisher to keep Mises's books in print and part of the goal of founding the institute was to make sure that Mises's works and also his ideas would enjoy a permanent home so that they would always be available and this he has done. The Mises Institute has a vast publishing apparatus in place more than 25 years later pushing not only Mises but also his students Rothbard, Sinholtz, Kirzner, as well as Mises's colleagues

8:44The Institute is hard at work bringing back in print and to the public eye the work of Misesian economists, philosophers, historians who wrote for the past 100 years, as well as the work of predecessors in the writings of today's scholars. So I'm very privileged to have watched the program grow and change with the technology through the years. So I'd like to tell a short history of it and then talk about the impact of the digital revolution and speak of some issues for the future and I hope to be able to leave time for questions. So in the beginning, publishing was a priority for the Institute, but the resources only allowed for the publication of short monographs like Rothbard's Essential von Mises, Sinholtz's Underground Economy, and our own publication called The Free Market. and Lew put me as editor of that. I think I was only six years old at the time. I was very pleased.

9:35He planned to start a journal with Murray Rothbard called The Review of Austrian Economics and there was a monograph on business cycle theory and a few other titles. In those days it was a real stretch for a tiny institute with no large donors and a staff of only a few and a very precarious existence in general. But consider what this provided. Mises had a home. Rothbard had a reliable writing and teaching outlet so that he could concentrate on what he did best. Students were getting scholarships to study economics and there were suddenly venues in which to publish. It's important to remember that Lew had no assurance at all that there would be a market in place to be interested in these titles and programs. He didn't know. Nor did he have a way to reach that market had it existed.

10:23We have a hard time remembering this now, but in those days the only way to find out about new publications was to slog through the library's reference section, open books like Books in Print, or lug around the Reader's Guide to Periodical Literature. I remember when the free market was in there. I'm old enough to remember those books. The year 1986 was a huge one for the Mises Institute, for that was the year of the first issue of the Review of Austrian Economics. Economics. The appearance of that journal drained a fantastic amount of resources, emotional and financial, from the Institute. Someday someone will have to write it up, write up all the details, but let me just say that Lew and Murray came face to face with some of the most powerful interest groups that did not want that journal published. The enemies of the RAE did everything in their power to kill it and destroy it, and destroy any prospect for an Austrian-focused academic journal.

11:20I remember when Lew was telling me the story in the office one day, and I found it just incredible. And he was very alarmed, but typical of both Lew and Murray, they took it all as a sign that they were on the right track. It took incredible moral courage to persevere, but against all odds, they did it. The journal appeared and later became the quarterly journal of Austrian economics. Now, all of these years later, it seems inevitable somehow that there had to be such a journal we all take it for granted just a part of the scholarly landscape but we need to appreciate that this almost didn't happen and it only did happen because of an incredible combination of moral stamina and intellectual dedication so let me return now to the whole issue of the market for these ideas Lew suspected that there was hunger for the ideas of liberty in the form that Mises and Rothbard presented them but he couldn't know for sure mostly this was not the issue that concerned him what drove him

12:16and the belief that there should be a market for these ideas, and if one didn't currently exist, he would make sure that one would be created. My friends, this is an incredible act of faith, one not driven by the desire for fame, fortune, heaven knows there's none of that, or power, quite the opposite, but a kind of crazy idealism that sets out to make a difference in the world and takes concrete steps necessary to achieve that. It is driven by the belief that something can be created out of nothing, the same motivation that has driven entrepreneurs from the beginning of time. But what were Lew and Murray's telling? What were they trying to convince the world to accept? Not a good or a service, but simply an idea. This is just about the most implausible notion one can imagine. And through this implausible possibility, they made a huge dent in the universe.

13:06and let me fast-forward now to the 1990s when more books began to come out including Mises' Money Method and the Market Process, still in print, The Economics of Ludwig von Mises, Rothbard's Scholar-Creator Hero, Gordon's Secession State and Liberty, Rothbard's Case Against the Fed, a book that Lew specifically commissioned, What Has Government Done to Our Money, and also John Denson's The Cost of War, which is a pioneering volume. Putting all this together, we began to see the emergence of a comprehensive intellectual arsenal in defense of human liberty. It was a combination of new material plus old that challenged the dominant political and economic trends of the time. Lewis commissioned new works at every step while looking for older works to put back in print. And in those days, the preferred model was to publish our own smaller books, but depend on academic publishers with which to cooperate on the larger books.

13:57Part of the reason was financial. There were also considerations of marketing. The bigger publishers had a better infrastructure for getting books out the door. Of course, in publishing this way, there was a major cost, though we didn't think of that cost at the time. Although it's pressed upon us very much today, we lost copyright control of the book. It's not something people often think about. More precisely, some other institution gained control of the book. We're more careful now. This factor wouldn't turn out to be hugely important into the great digital revolution of 1995 and following. I dated all this year from this year because this was the year that web browsing began to enter the mainstream, and the year that I think I finally upgraded to my first, if you want to call it an upgrade to Windows.

14:43It was the year that Murray Rothbard died, and at that moment there was a profound sense that we had lost the asset the asset that made everything else we had seem tiny by comparison. It was a time of total transformation of the Institute. Lew was personally devastated, of course, but determined to press on exactly as Murray would have him do. Our senior faculty redoubled their efforts. The same happened among our staff. We had to push forward for the sake of the ideals. This is what Lew said, and he provided the model. Also, the rejoicing of all of our enemies spurred us onward, too, I must say. We had lost Murray, but his passing coincided in time with the most remarkable publishing tool in human history, a tool that would take his ideas and that of the Austro-libertarian tradition on to new heights.

15:32The first Mises Institute website went live in 1996. This was the year that an incredible choice was forced on every existing institution in the world to go online or stay doing business the old way, and it was widely assumed that by choosing one path, you were forgoing the other path, and this is especially true in the world of publishing. The most obvious reason why this ominous choice, why this was an ominous choice dealt with money, going online was an extra expense, and it wasn't obvious why or how it would pay off financially. And for many years, in fact, the whole web business seemed like a huge money pit. And for many institutions, it remains so. Actually, it sort of still is for the Institute, now that I think about it, but for the Institute, The choice wasn't that difficult to make. Here we had a medium that was custom made for students. We could push our message out the door in nearly infinite amounts for an

16:23upfront investment. Yes, it was costly, but look at the payoff. We could reach people who would otherwise never know about our work. And over time we began to realize ever more just how powerful this medium really is. One of the great shocks was the reality of retrospective publishing where we were able to bring back extremely rare publications, some of which which had a very low circulation back into the mainstream of life. Publications such as Rothbard's Left and Right and early issues of the Journal of Libertarian Studies, most of which had vanished without a trace. The consciousness of what was possible began to rise even as technology advanced month by month. This was a time when scanning was difficult and inaccurate and overly heavy relative to bandwidth, what bandwidth would support.

17:11The scanning is accessible, beautiful and light, and as a result we've been moving forward with the drive to put online as much as humanly possible. Our online editions are superior to the others because you can always copy and paste out of them. It makes them better than Google Books or anybody else. You can find them very easily. We give the entire text with no fussy frames or odd software or demands for logging in or, you know, coffeeing up or whatever. And then there's the media. We were able to dig through the archives and find speeches by Mises and Rothbard and also Hayek in addition to the complete lecture series by Robert Lefebvre, among many others. Our own conferences were put online in audio and video, and I think just yesterday Chad put up a Rothbard lecture from 1983, from the Gold Conference. Remarkable, isn't it? Like all history is sort of happening at one time or something.

18:01As a result, the vast corpus of our work and our own tradition is increasingly available, either in print or online or both. Now, earlier I spoke about the challenge and opportunity that digital media meant for all institutions. What we discovered over time is that digital and physical are not substitutes. They're really complements. That is to say, in real life, people use both. Sometimes we use digital and sometimes we use physical. In the course of our lives, we rely on both forms, with each medium enhancing the value of the other. When we publish a book now, we put it online the same time it comes out physically, the whole text. I'm not sure I know anybody else who does this. Actually, lately we've been putting out the digital version even before the physical version comes out, which is driving our publications department crazy.

18:54This is made possible by a major change in our operations. We stopped giving away copyrights to others to control, precisely so that the material could reach the broadest possible audience. We've even taken the step of putting the entire empire of Mises org into the status of creative commons that happened just two weeks ago. ." Now, if there is time, if we do have time for questions, I would like to address some more of this issue of the Institute publishing things. We really face this choice with the Hohesman biography, that big thick book that's out there. This is obviously a masterpiece and we had several bids from several publishers, major Publishers, important prestigious publishers that sell books for lots of money and we turn them down mainly because we knew we could do a better looking book at a lower price but also because we wanted to maintain control of the text. Well basically we wanted to offer it free online and we could not get any publisher to agree to let us to do that. It's interesting

20:05Now, the immediate objection to this policy is that it cuts into the sales of physical versions, and I'm sure you're thinking that, right? But if that's the worry, you really have to ask yourself why you would want to charge people for a physical version they don't want or need. That's interesting. If they're happy with the digital version and don't like the book enough to buy it, there really isn't a reason to sell it. To put it plainly, it's very bad management and very short-sighted commerce to ask people to cough up for something they won't be happy with. Do you understand? If you have a good product that you're proud to distribute, it's never a mistake to give more information rather than less, especially if you can do it at low cost.

20:52This is an important principle, and I run into institutions all the time that don't understand this. They think we're crazy. I think they're crazy. The second major error that people make is not exclusive to the digital problem, but it afflicts all institutions. They assume a fixed market for their product, and they forget their evangelical aims. Lew has never made this mistake. As I mentioned, he began with virtually no market at all. The educational efforts created something out of nothing. And following this model, the Institute has always been 50% evangelism and 50% delivery from the very beginning. The Mises Institute is now the only reason that the major works of all the Austrians and major American libertarian writers are in print and available to the world.

21:39And to conjure up a world without the Institute's publishing program is to observe a dimly lit scene turning to darkness. But with this program, one can more easily imagine a bright future for humanity, the very one of which lovers of liberty have long dreamed. And I'm going to leave it at that and I hope it answers some of your questions. I know there have to be questions about this crazy stuff. What would be the expert on stamp on this question of trademark and how you protect yourself? Trademark or copyright? Copyright.

22:24Well, it slowly dawned on us over a long period of time one of the things you learn about this whole question of whether or not something is in copy. How can I possibly answer this question? This is an important issue and I could talk for endless hours about it. The main thing that you have to look at is the law and don't trust the institutions that you think might be the owners because they will lie to you. This happens all the time. They will lie to you. And they will try to get you to not print things that are in fact or in public domain. You can get lots of crazy warnings from anonymous emails and all sorts of things, but you have to adhere to the law and do your research.

23:09Lots of the information is in fact public, but you have to know the law, know it well, and then forge ahead with confidence and do the right thing. Now there are many works that have been published since 1963 that are, well look, lots of things came together in history to make all of this possible. One of the most exceptional, I'd like you to think about this, large publishers tended to renew their copyrights after the 28 years passed, this is before 1963, they tended to Renew their copyrights, which would tie them up for another, I don't know, 600 years or something, but most of the works in our tradition were published by not major publishers, but by lower level publishers that didn't have a long life and they don't have a big staff of lawyers to keep up with renewals and things, so lots of our work was not renewed. By ours I mean the Austro-libertarian tradition. This turns out to be a wonderful thing. Think about this. Interesting, isn't it?

24:14If you were a libertarian writing in 1935 and you want to be published by Knopf or whatever big publisher was around, you couldn't get them to pay attention to your ideas, so you had to go with some other thing, some other small press somewhere, and you were sad about that. Well, it was a good thing because the press went out of business later and the work was not renewed and it went into public domain and now it's in print. If it was renewed, would not be in print. Extraordinary, isn't it? So we're very fortunate, very, very fortunate in that way. So there's that. The other thing is that there's a great deal of mythology about copyright. People think that if I can just maintain this government-granted monopoly or this text, then I'll be in good shape and make the big bucks.

25:04It's just not true. The best thing you can do, the most important thing you can do is get attention for your work and that's why the institutes went into Creative Commons and that's why we're increasingly publishing our own things so that we can distribute them as widely as possible. Copywriting is very much the enemy of free flow of ideas. It's been catastrophic. It's interesting how sometimes these things work out. We were thinking about putting into press this Robert Taft book called Foreign Policy for Americans. It was renewed. The book came out in like 1954. Is that right? 53, 52, something like that. The book was renewed and so it was under copyright. I suspected it was what's called an orphan work. Somebody I think he owns it, but I don't know who it could be. It could be the guy working in the garden out there. It could be, you know, anybody on the planet, you know, because you can have a copyright passed on to you and then pass it on to somebody else and somebody else and so on.

26:05I finally ended up calling Robert Taft's, let's see, what is he, grandson? Yeah. And talked to him about it. And I said, I think you might own this. And he said, well, you know, I just don't know. I don't have to go through probate, you know, dig up the records. I just really don't know. and and he didn't know and nobody knew and but he finally gave us you know permission to put it put it online but that's what happens when things are renewed I mean it kills the book it kills the book you think about this if you're ever in a position to decide to read well you might find yourself in a position to renew a book I just have to tell you it's a bad idea don't do it you think you're doing the right thing protecting the heritage of you know your The online products have come a long way in the past 15 years. Is there a next step in the evolution to make it even better that Mises is all about?

27:18They have, they permit you to publish a book and embed it in a blog. The whole book. So you can turn the pages. I've got several samples on the blog now. So, I don't know, we just all kind of went nuts for this thing. That was about a week ago and already we've got about 15 books on that little thing, you know. And the company loves us. They're writing us notes. Hey, it's fantastic. Whole book's free. This is wonderful. You know, color covers. And now they're being embedded in blogs all around, you know. It's just a matter of staying up with the technology. It's very difficult to make long-term plans because in a vibrant, dynamic marketplace, with technology changing constantly, you have to adjust according to innovations as they come along. But let me just say that we'll continue to do everything we possibly can do.

28:08I know that we have, before the end of the year, there will be another, probably 20 books come into print. Just for example. Can you tell us a little bit about your bestsellers and sort of what are the metrics of the 50,000 copies if you'll allow us? Oh, you want numbers, yeah. And you could relate it also to the web. Well, our best-selling book right now is probably, it's a contest between Rothbard's Mystery of Banking, another book that came and went very quickly, I think it was 1982, Judy? 1982, something like that. And we just brought it out again in a beautiful new edition, and it's selling like crazy. And it's competing with Economics I Lesson, written in 1946 by Henry Haslip.

29:01Tragically, we can't put that one online, and there are lots of things I would like to say about that publicly. Who sold you the economics and what was it? Yeah, it's very, you know, let's just talk afterwards. Don't forget the question. Well, so, I'm wondering how much I can really say. Well, let me just say that, you know, I would like to give you numbers, but I think there's reasons, there's reasons. Well, let me just say it's a lot. A lot of books. Yeah, yeah.

29:46The reason has nothing to do with wanting to keep internal secrets or something like that, but there's a lot of broad considerations. I don't have a figure, but let me just say that this year alone we'll probably distribute a hundred thousand books, maybe, in physical form. Thanks a lot, Jeff.