Dr. North said that he decided to donate the library to the Mises Institute as a way to assist the Institute’s Fellows and faculty, according to the Institute web site. “The Mises Institute has very bright summer interns: Ph.D. candidates working on their dissertations, with the assistance of scholars.”
The library “is heavily oriented towards history and social science,” North explained, recalling that “not many economists are gifted historians the way Murray Rothbard was. He would have loved [the library].”
The books arrived Wednesday.
cue Jerry WG, "Koch bros self published biographies,and Rushdooney pamphlets", (followed by whining, grunts gnashing of teeth etc etc)
ReplyDeleteImpressive ... until I realized 10,000 books will fit on a 16 gig Kindle, and could be sent overnight in a FedEx envelope.
ReplyDeleteI still really like paper books for pleasurable reading. For searching for information ebooks, .pdfs, browsing the Mises site, etc. are the way to go. But I really hate looking at a digital screen if I don't have to.
DeleteAnd years ago, you would have preferred carry around huge stone carvings. However, I've yet to buy a Kindle.
DeleteYou think you can get all those out of print books on a Kindle? :)
DeleteI prefer real books to ebooks most of the time. Sometimes it's nice to be able to do a quick search for a specific passage or whatever, but that seems to lead to people taking things out of context more often than not. At least with a real book I'm likely to get the context of the passage while skimming.
DeleteOnly if they existed in a digital format. One can only imagine what this treasure trove contains in terms of rare, obscure, and out-of-print materials.
DeleteAlso, I'd bet money this isn't all of North's library.
Google has technology for scanning massive numbers of books. Hint to LvMI: talk to Google. They're not entirely evil.
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