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://mises.org/Community/forums/p/29982/479290.aspx#479290 http://wiki.mises.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.
Keep up the great work, Tex!
Mises Wiki | Economic Resources and Books (search engine)
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?
^This.
Seriously, you're a badass and I am grateful for your willingness to do this work!
The only one worth following is the one who leads... not the one who pulls; for it is not the direction that condemns the puller, it is the rope that he holds.
Peter Sidor: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.
John James:Did you ever create one for Against Intellectual Monopoly?
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.
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. :(
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...
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.
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.
John James:If not, it's not as if an EPUB version has to be hosted at mises.org or any other such site.
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...
myhumangetsme:FIrst of all, congratulations. This is a well-deserved hire.
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.
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://mises.org/community/forums/t/33311.aspx
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.
Tex, thanks again for all the good work and congrats on the well deserved LvMI position!
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.
z1235:Tex, thanks again for all the good work and congrats on the well deserved LvMI position!
Did you receive my emails?
+1
Clayton -
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. :)
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
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.
Tex2002ans...sent you a PM...did you get it?
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). :)
Could you do Dissent on Keynes?
http://library.mises.org/books/Mark%20Skousen,%20ed/Dissent%20on%20Keynes%20A%20Critical%20Appraisal%20of%20Keynesian%20Economics.pdf
fegeldolfy:Could you do Dissent on Keynes?
Indeed. I began working on it as soon as I read your post. I completed the OCR, and I just finished doing a rough cleaning of the EPUB. The EPUB should be done within a few days.
I just finished the Dissent on Keynes, it is up on my site. Enjoy! :)
Please let me know if you catch any typos, or any things that need corrections.
Thanks.
I just completed an EPUB of:
Leviathan in Crisis by Waldo Ralph Browne
from the Archive.org version here: http://archive.org/details/leviathanincrisi00brow
I created a much cleaner/smaller PDF (also made it B&W). Although who would use that when you have the great EPUB version. :)
I put in the request for it to be put up on Mises.org (hopefully that gets accepted), but as always, it is sitting up on my site for now.
I do not know who requested it originally, but the PDF was sitting in one of my folders for a long time, so someone on the forums must have requested it.
fegeldolfy:Thanks.
Welcome.
I just completed converting an official Mises EPUB:
The Gold Standard: Perspectives in the Austrian School edited by Lew Rockwell
It will be tweaked in the coming days (need a high resolution cover image, plus most likely some tiny tweaks here and there). Should be up officially on Mises soon, but if you want to read the text, my version should be good to go. :)
Unofficial:
Interpretations of the Wicksellian Idea by Robert Bradley Jr.
I just randomly picked that book out of the PDFs and decided to convert it. The PDF is missing page 44, so I put in a request for that... hopefully the original is still around somewhere and can be scanned.
I pulled all of the files on both sites, and took a quick look at them. The Richard Mitchell ones might be ok, although the code behind the site looks EXTREMELY poor (might take me some time to create regex to clean it up, they are all sitting in tables).
The Julian Simon site is just ATROCIOUS. The files are in "preformatted" text documents, with the formatting done as spaces... and there are carriage returns/line breaks everywhere. It will be a complete pain in the butt to convert. PLUS, I noticed lots of errors in the text, and it is missing the images (looks like in a lot of his works there are lots of diagrams). Would probably be a lot less work to just work from scratch! It makes me sad when there are really crappy conversions like that.
These book conversions should be done ONCE correctly, so it will not have to be done ever again. Then then books can live on until time immemorial. :)
Congrats and keep up the good work..
Tex,
Could you convert http://mises.org/books/kates.pdf?
I know there is a missing page in there, any way you could find it?
My humble blog
It's easy to refute an argument if you first misrepresent it. William Keizer
Kindles cannot handle epub files.
When you convert the epub to mobi using something like Calibre, does it change the formatting at all? That is what i'm afraid of. That some of the formatting will be lost when I convert an epub to mobi. That is why I always try to download mobi files for my kindle.
limitgov:Kindles cannot handle epub files.
That's why Kindles suck.
Well it's the best option you have if you insist on using restrictive technology like the Kindle. (Unless of course you wish to buy all the titles you want to read from Amazon in their crappy proprietary format). Any formatting alterations that occur during conversion should be as minimal as possible, with the extensive and detailed way Tex goes about creating the epubs.
But yes, there are no guarantees you'll get a quality output after the conversion. That's just the nature of propriety file formats. (And that's just the files themselves. We're not even talking about the hoops that come with everyone using their own DRM scheme.)
My recommendation: ditch the Amazon technology and send them a note saything they lost a customer because of their petulant resistence to an open standard, and assholish insistence on restrictive technology and sales practices.
"That's why Kindles suck."
Someone got me my kindle a while back. I'll be honest...its been great, except for the lack of epub support.
So, epub is the open source format? Do nooks support epub fully?
That is lame that amazon is not supporting a very popular ebook standard. But, I'm stuck with it.
I also wish it supported pdf's in a better way.
limitgov:So, epub is the open source format? Do nooks support epub fully?
Perhaps you could look at the link I included for you. Particularly this section.
If you have a Kindle Fire you can sideload any EPUB reading app, including Nook.
Smiling Dave:Tex, Could you convert http://mises.org/books/kates.pdf? I know there is a missing page in there, any way you could find it?
I will toss that on my list, give it a few weeks. Wow that scan is bad though! If you could tell me what page is missing, I can put in a request for getting a scan of the missing page.
Indeed, Amazon uses proprietary formats for their ebooks. The older Kindles used the MOBI format, while newer Kindles support KF8 (I believe Kindle 3 with a firmware update, and any Kindles newer than that).
MOBI is a horrible format, while KF8 has almost exactly the same functionality of an EPUB, but is proprietary.
limitgov:When you convert the epub to mobi using something like Calibre, does it change the formatting at all?
EPUB to MOBI, yes, there is the potential (because the MOBI format is garbage). EPUB to KF8, you should be ok (KF8 is pretty much an EPUB inside).
But as John James mentioned, the way that I build the EPUBs, I use very minimal CSS which should convert perfectly fine. I try to make the books work on the maximum possible amount of devices, with an eye towards any future file formats. When you start getting spaghetti code and convoluted CSS, this leads to more potential areas of breaking in conversion.
Also, since MOBI/KF8 are proprietary, the Calibre conversion for those formats were all "reverse engineered". There is no guarantee that it will convert 100% Amazon friendly (although they try to do their best).
limitgov:That is what i'm afraid of. That some of the formatting will be lost when I convert an epub to mobi. That is why I always try to download mobi files for my kindle.
I guarantee you that 95%+ of any (non-self-published) ebooks purchased from Amazon were BUILT FROM AN EPUB. The way that it currently works is, you design an EPUB, then you feed it into Amazon's proprietary converter (Kindlegen), or feed it to Amazon (who runs it through a near-Kindlegen program on their servers). Kindlegen generates a MOBI/KF8 file, which Amazon then sells and sends to the Kindle users.
Then the companies sell the original EPUB version they created in every other store.
Pretty much every single ereader out there is EPUB. Only Kindles are MOBI/KF8.
EPUB is an open format. The dumb way to explain it is that EPUB is "XHTML in a special zip file". You can take the EPUB apart, and you get the EXACT HTML + CSS. Sort of like if you said "View Source" on a website.
MOBI/KF8 are "compiled" formats. You feed your code through, and it tries to translate all of the XHTML + CSS into some crappy subset (compresses images if they are too large, resizes images if too large, removes unsupported CSS, etc. etc.). Sort of like if you looked at a Binary program in a Hex Editor.
Sure, you could use a decompiler and maybe figure out SOME code, but you won't be able to get the exact original code.
limitgov:I also wish it supported pdf's in a better way.
Most of these ereaders are too small to handle PDF well. You might have luck with this (I never used this program before):
http://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=144711
I try to avoid PDF like the plague now. I just try to convert everything I can into EPUB. In my opinion, it is just WAY better for reading (and all of the indirect benefits as well, such as easy copy/pastability/searching/converting to other future formats).
The missing page is page 152 of the printed book, 160 of the PDF file.
Instead there appears page 150 of the printed book on page 160 of the PDF file.
In other words, the pages that show up are 1-149, 150, 151, 150 again instead of 152, 153 etc
Tex2002ans: Smiling Dave:Tex, Could you convert http://mises.org/books/kates.pdf? I know there is a missing page in there, any way you could find it? I will toss that on my list, give it a few weeks. Wow that scan is bad though!
I will toss that on my list, give it a few weeks. Wow that scan is bad though!
Today was quite productive, I finished official work on a redone EPUB of "The Historical Setting of the Austrian School of Economics" by Ludwig von Mises. (just need a little Quality Checking (QC)), and it should be posted up soon. :)
I also see that Libertarian Forum with tons of code fixes/optimizations/typo corrections got posted a few days ago.
I also just did a lot of organizing/renaming of files which will help me in the long-run.
adam cruz:Congrats and keep up the good work..
Thank you, I shall. :)
myhumangetsme:Try this copy.
Fantastic, looks like a MUCH cleaner scan, and it has those missing pages that Smiling Dave mentioned. You have saved me many hours of my life. I just finished cleaning it up, and will begin the OCR soon.
As a side note, I sent you an email about the Jevons book, please let me know if you recieved it.
Myhuman, that copy is awesome. Thank you.
Much thanks to Tex, whose work has been phenomenal. Look out for increasingly more EPUBs being made available for download on Mises.org.
Cheers!