The PDF lets people get access to books long out-of-print. It is a marvelous technology.
Recently, I sent off 15 volumes that are 40 years old to a company that converts books into PDFs. This is going to cost me about $500 to post these materials on this website. I am going to post them free of charge. I think they are that important.
If I were doing it the way that the Mises Institute did it, or if I were trying to make money selling printed books, I would do what Mises did: combine PDFs with print-on-demand books. It is an excellent marketing strategy. People who want to read a book can read it free of charge on-screen. They have to use a desktop or laptop computer. But nobody wants to read a long book on-screen. So, the next step for the person reading the book is to click the "print" button or icon. This way, for about two cents a page, a reader can get the book printed out. This is obviously a true believer. True believers own three hole punches. Then they insert the pages into a three-ring binder. Presto. You have a book.
The Mises Institute figured out the next step. Most people don't want to have ugly, tall, three-ring binders filling their shelves. So, they take the next step. They order a book that was printed on demand. This is a sensible way to market to those people who still read books. The Mises Institute has sold a lot a books with this strategy.
Not every organization wants to sell books. I used to run an organization that did: the Institute for Christian Economics. I decided in December 2001 to shut it down. I had created it a quarter-century earlier in order to fund the typesetting, printing, and distribution of my books. I published other people's books, too. The strategy worked, but I had to invest something like 20 hours a week free of charge to run the organization. I had to write monthly newsletters, write the cover letters, and hire two or three women who ran the bookselling and subscription operations. In 2001 realized that I could typeset a book with my own typesetting equipment, convert it to a PDF in less than a minute, and post the PDF on my website in less than a minute. Why should I ask people to donate money, which was no longer necessary?
I have paid thousands of dollars to convert the books I published into PDFs. You can download them free of charge on this website. But this is not enough for some people. They think I ought to convert all the books into Kindle books, or some equivalent EPUB format. This would of course cost thousands more dollars. But that's what they want me to do. They do not understand the fundamental principle of economics: at zero price, there is greater demand than supply. They say that they want to read my books on a smart phone.
This misunderstands what I am trying to do with my scholarly materials. No serious scholar reads an e-book. He cannot footnote specific pages. The book does not have numbered pages. It automatically formats itself to the size of the screen. A scholar wants a physical book in his lap, where he can mark it up. He will accept a PDF if he gets to read it for free. With a PDF, the pages stay consistent, so he can footnote them appropriately. In other words, people who change civilization don't read e-books except to get a brief, overall view of the whole book. Then they either print out a PDF or they buy a print on demand book. My market is people who want to change civilization. It always has been.
If you want to help people change the world, you have to do it in steps. It starts with a headline for an ad. Then it moves to the copy for the ad. Then it moves either to a PDF or an e-book. Then it goes to print on demand. Then it goes to YouTube videos for training purposes. All of this is necessary if somebody is really serious about changing the world. But hardly anybody is.
The great thing about all this is that one person can do it. This was never possible before. Because of the World Wide Web, it is possible today. I will be doing more of this over the next five years, now that I have finished my work for the Ron Paul Curriculum.
With respect to serious books, the least important of these steps is an e-book that can be read on a smart phone. A smart phone is not good for sitting quietly, thinking about what you're reading, and either printing out the material or else extracting notes to post on Evernote. The notes on Evernote have to link to a specific page, or else you cannot accurately footnote the origin of the extracted piece of information. Smart phones do not let you have specific pages that are common to every smart phone. This makes the smart phone almost useless for serious scholarship.
I don't think you can change the world without serious scholarship. I have believed this for over 50 years. This is why I intend to have four versions of my book on Christian economics: student's, teacher's, leader's, and scholar's. Version four will have lots of footnotes. It will be published as a PDF. I want Google to be able to find it. I want people to be able to print it out in PDF. I doubt that I will put it into print on demand, but I might. I do know this: I am not going to put it into Kindle format. I may post a couple of chapters this way for marketing purposes, but not the whole book. Nobody in his right mind would read a detailed, scholarly book on a smart phone. He will forget too much. Smartphones are fine for videos. They are not fine for PDFs, which means that they are not fine for anything resembling scholarship.
You have to know the limitations of the technology you are trying to use. Nobody is going to read a 1500 page PDF book on a smart phone.
I am a scholar. I want to reach scholars. If you don't reach scholars, you don't change civilization. I like YouTube videos. I like short e-books. I think print on demand is okay if you are selling books, and you can afford the set-up fees. But I think the least useful way to communicate serious ideas is on a smart phone. The world can be introduced to a new idea by means of a short video that is viewed on a smart phone. You can read novels on a smart phone. But you should not read serious scholarly materials on a smart phone, except perhaps brief extracts. The extracts should take you to a PDF.
Here are the basic rules. Know your audience. Have a plan for what it is that you want specific members of your audience to do after they read your article or watch your YouTube video. Know your technology. You must create steps to get your audience to the point where a tiny percentage of them can begin to change the world around them.
I have recommended the following marketing approach. First, the shotgun. Second, the rifle. Third, the scope. The shotgun is a something that can be read on a smart phone. The rifle is the PDF. Never mistake a smart phone for a rifle or a scope.
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