I recently announced the completion of a new audiobook, The History of the Fabian Society, but this time this audiobook was not completed by myself, but by a friend of mine who has also taken to recording audiobooks with a more conservative-interested focus. One of the biggest, if not the biggest problem of all that we face is information availability. Everywhere you turn, information is withheld and omitted. By making these works into audio, what we are doing is making the information into a sort of a pill that people can simply swallow. Reading a book takes a lot of time. You can listen to audio at the gym. So it goes. Audiobooks save time.
But there's a flip side to this. When we first started having conversations about 'what book should we pick', our original goal was a book offered by the Mises Institute. I for sure thought that this was safe, since Mises has some reservations about copyrights and these are made known fairly publicly.
The book we initially planned on seeing a recording made was Fabian Freeway: High Road to Socialism in the U.S.A. As you can see, now, that page says Access Denied. When we emailed Mises, Mises emailed the publisher. The end result is that this book is no longer accessible through that gateway. I personally find it strange that anybody (I'm referring to the publisher here) would refuse it when someone says "we will do free work for you". But hey, to each his own.
Now the thought occurs to me, how many people really, are going to Mises so they can download the PDF or EPUB versions of Fabian Freeway? I don't know, but as already eluded to, we fixed it to some extent with a trade off by the general availablity of Pease's history book. The two are not completely equivalent, of course, however, give it a little bit of time to work its way out into the world and the Fabian audiobook will get much more traction. So that's the story, the damage we did and the end-result trade off that we did not plan going in to be making. We didn't even know we were putting in an order for some lemons, but after that's what we were handed, we made some lemonade.
Now as an addendum, since I started typing this a few days ago, I have since discovered that Mises did not go very far in locking down access to these files. That, coupled with the Wayback Machine, these files cannot be lost. For now, here are the two sub-gateways to the files, respectively:
Fabian Freeway High Road to Socialism in the USA.epub
Fabian Freeway High Road to Socialism in the USA.pdf
And here are the Internet Archive backups. These include the actual file and not just the gateways. So you can still read these works.
Archive: Fabian Freeway High Road to Socialism in the USA.epub
Archive: Fabian Freeway High Road to Socialism in the USA.pdf
So now, you have all of the files you had before without any loss whatsoever. But you also gain a full audiobook that is well executed and worth putting your time into.
