Books and ebooks from Liberty Fund

Yesterday I searched the Net for all things related to the topic Economists' Ethics and came across a book of essays by Paul Heyne. It is published by Liberty Fund and also made available as a freely downloadable ebook.

Ah, the Liberty Fund!

Back in the late 80s when I was reading Hayek seriously, I came across an organisation called Liberal Fund which published classic and contemporary texts of a libertarian/conservative nature, at rather low prices. I bought over 20 titles from them, including Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations, and Theory of Moral Sentiments, Hayek's Counter Revolution of Science, von Mises' Socialism, James Buchanan's What Should Econimists Do?, Armen Alchian's Economic Forces at Work, Frank Knight's Freedom and Reform, Arthur Hogue's Origins of the Common Law, and Lord Acton's Essays in the History of Liberty.

As for Liberty Fund itself, I thought I had a rough idea about it and was frankly not interested in knowing more. Moreover, in the pre-Internet era, it was not easy to find such obscure information even if you wanted to.

Now, because I downloaded an ebook from them yesterday, I googled about it and still couldn't find much. Presumably the Liberty Fund is just another libertarian organisation from the US, specialising in publishing and organising conferences, not too well known nationally, let alone internationally.

Anyway, like some 20-odd years ago, I am not particularly curious about the organisation, only the books it publishes. What I want to say in this blog post is that the Liberty Fund is moving with time and publishing electronically. Most titles are free. But more importantly, I think they have done a good job by making available the ebooks in different formats: HTML, facsimile PDF, ebook PDF and E-pub.

Visit The Online Library of Liberty for a treasure hunt.

- or Library of Economics and Liberty if your primary interest is Economics
- or Liberty Fund books if your love with books is decidedly physical