Earlier this year, the copyright claimant to the Tannihills’ classic book The Market for Liberty demanded that Mises.org unhost a pdf to the book. We tried to explain that this would hurt sales of the book, which the publisher was trying to market. This was correct of course: sales plummeted, which is exactly what one would expect if you keep the products under the counter and demand that people cough up for them without seeing them.
There is nothing particularly unusual about the demand (though I never actually saw the proof). The very life of the Internet is daily under attack in the name of “property rights.” The odd thing is that the claimant was Laissez-Faire Books under the management of one Jim Peron, an old timer with reactionary views on intellectual property, so reactionary that he actually invoked state power to digitally ban a text that advocates and explains anarchy. The irony is intense.
Actually, the action was even more terrible that it appears. There were several college classes that were using this text and suddenly it was not available from the main link – and the action sent students and professors hunting for pirate editions online (which of course they found in time).
Ok, now to the great news and a great Christmas gift. Bad management failed the market test. Laissez-Faire Books is now sold to Agora Financial, a wonderfully competent company of free-market thinkers and doers. We are already planning some co-publication projects with the new company. It has a bright future.
The payoff for you is that The Market for Liberty is back!
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Great news Jeffrey. Merry Xmas.
Love ya Jeff!!! Happy Holidays!
This is great! Merry Christmas.
+ it’s Tannehills’, rather than Tannehill’s on first line, right?
It’s nice to see the market in action in a way politicians all to often fail to appreciate.
I’m sitting here in the dense woodlands of northern Sweden in a car by an American company on a laptop from Taiwan a 3G modem from china and a 3G network built by Swedish Ericsson.
No government bureaucrat would have thought of that 10 years ago, isn’t capitalism wonderfull.
Adrian
wonderful tale of the market having it’s way with the producers! they probably went broke because of their policy of not giving away free e-books and became thereby a bargain for another company that does understand how the modern non-fiction book market now works.
…and the action sent students and professors hunting for pirate editions online (which of course they found in time).
I don’t know what I’d do without pirate textbooks to use for extra material in teaching math courses.
If it wasn’t to my exposure of Human Action, Man, Economy, and State, and Money, Bank Credit, and Economic Cycles in the Literature section of this site, I never would have purchased the actual hard copies that I love so dearly.
Same here. I started reading Human Action on this site, which led to buying the hard copy, which led to buying many other books (like MES), including recently 10 copies of the new paperback (I could’t pass up 10 copies of Human Action for $80).
Agora is a great company from what I know of them. Glad to hear they’ll be colaborating with the Mises Institute.
I’d go one step further and offer it in e-Pub as well.
I was reminded this Christmas of why the movie It’s A Wonderful Life became a Christmas classic. The movie originally was a flop, such a bad flop that the copyright was not renewed. Because it has no monopoly copyright protection the television networks could play it without payign the huge royalties demanded for other movies. Becuase of the play time a movie that had once been a colossal flop is now a timeless Christmas classic.
I just love it when stupidity is exposed.
I was becoming horrified as I read this, since I had just ordered some books from Laissez Faire Books… until I got to the end. I bought from the new management, whew!
They are offering a steep discount and a free copy of Economics in One Lesson, if you find their discount code. I got it from an emailing, so get on their email list before Dec 31st. The Daily Reckoning is solid Austrian analysis of the news of the day.
That’s great news for all parties. Agora Financial does some of the best applied economics (much Austrian-based) investment research around.
Great! I wondered what happened to it. I had it linked on my blog and then it was gone. Happy to put it back.
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