Thursday, September 13, 2012

My first book transcription: Fabian Freeway

The more I have read through this book, the more I keep thinking to myself how well it lays things out with regard to the close relationship between the early progressives and Fabians. Especially in the footnotes. Anybody can say anything they want, it's when you footnote and prove the things you are saying to be true.(and yes I have taken random footnotes here and there and went hunting, I can verify a lot of them)

By transcribing the book, I am continuing a goal for myself that I have always held to be important: easier information access. The book itself - Fabian Freeway - High Road to Socialism in the USA - is up on the Mises Institute's web servers in PDF format. I have referenced it several times for numerous things, but during this process I noticed that much of the content of the book does not show up in a search engine if you set out to find it. This is compounded by the book's original content. Whomever owned the specific copy of the book that ended up getting scanned wrote in it with a pen, and computer software isn't very good at separating pen marks from explicitly typed book text.

I made it a point to ask members of the Mises community, as well as email people within the Institute who would know, as to the status this book's copyright. I have several reasons for doing this on the freecapitalists.org blog instead of here on my main site, many of which I explain here. One more reason is the issue of copyright; This blog site is explicitly tied in with the Mises Institute.

The book transcription is complete. It shouldn't take long for the book's contents to be easy to search or find in any search engine or search the contents with a browser. There are some visual issues with the Appendices. Being as I used a combination of software, internet tools, and manual typing, the lists of names do not have consistency. But they do match the contents of the book. If you are someone who is actively reading the book, or planning on do so, I will fix any errors you find if you just contact me and let me know about it.

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