This talk was delivered at the Mises Institute’s Supporters Summit, November 1, 2008, Auburn, Alabama. An MP3 audio version of this talk is available for download.
Each year I like to give a roundup of where we stand in terms of publishing and online resources, and every year I’m struck by how much progress we’ve made. And yet this year, there is something astounding to share with you.
With 300 books in our catalog, the overwhelming majority of which have been internally published; with an online store that is second to none in the world of pro-liberty publishing; with a website delivering nearly 7 terabytes of data out the door every month to one million unique visitors per month; with nearly the entire corpus of Mises, Rothbard, Hazlitt, Röpke, Hayek, Hutt, Spadaro, Chodorov, Nock, Garrett, Ron Paul, John T. Flynn, Böhm-Bawerk, Menger, Bastiat, Hahn, Say, and Wicksell, among many others, in print and available for free download or purchase in hardcopy; with the complete run of seven journals online, many of which would have otherwise sunk without a trace; and with 30,000 rare books in this physical library begging to be scanned; it is fair to say that the Mises Institute has achieved a level of productivity and effectiveness that none of us imagined possible in the past.
By the way, people wonder what 7 terabytes means. To get an idea of how much that is, this is nearly equivalent to the entire printed collection of the Library of Congress. Another measure: it is 335,000 trees made into paper and printed. This is a volume of information in the material world that would have been inconceivable even a decade ago. And by delivering digitally, just think of the glorious things that Mises.org is doing to help the environment! The tree huggers should love us. That’s our kind of recycling.
Many people write or drop by to ask how this has been accomplished. As with all endeavors, it has been a matter of tiny steps taken every day by the staff, along with the willingness of our members and donors to provide support through faith in the ideals that the Mises Institute represents.
The guiding principle of management here can always and everywhere be summed up in a single principle: generosity. The Mises Institute gives as much as it can as often as it can.
Jeffrey Tucker [send him mail] is editorial vice president of www.Mises.org.
