"Red Economics" (1932 work, PDF)

[Ismail]

https://archive.org/details/RedEconomics

I recently bought this and decided to scan it 'cause... I can. It's a compilation of bourgeois articles about the USSR, some more sympathetic than others. The chapter titles, authors and their positions as listed in table of contents are:

THE PLANNED ECONOMY
By William Henry Chamberlin, Moscow correspondent of the Christian Science Monitor

THE ECONOMIC ORGANIZATION
By Hans Jonas, Editor of the Ost-Europa-Markt, Königsberg

ECONOMIC INFORMATION AND THE PRESS
By Arthur W. Just, Moscow correspondent of the Kölnische Zeitung; author of several books on Soviet Russia

THE CAPTAINS OF INDUSTRY AND TRADE
By Heinrich Pöppelman

INDUSTRY
By Nikolaus Basseches, Moscow correspondent of the Neue Freie Presse of Vienna

AGRICULTURE
By Otto Auhagen, Director of the Osteuropa Institute in Breslau; formerly agricultural adviser to the German embassy in Moscow

STATE FINANCE
By Gerhard Dobbert, financial expert; author of numerous books on Russian financial questions

MONEY, CREDIT, AND BANKING
By Malcolm Campbell

COMMUNICATION
By H. Saller, Director of German Railways; expert on Moscow

THE HOME MARKET
By Wilhelm Roellinghoff, representative of the Wolff Telephone Bureau in Moscow

HOUSING PROBLEMS
By Hans Schmidt, Swiss architect

SOCIAL PROBLEMS AND SOCIAL CONDITIONS
By Pietro Sessa, Moscow correspondent of the Tribuna of Rome

FOREIGN TECHNICAL ASSISTANCE
By Georg Cleinow, Lecturer at the German Academy of Political Science, Berlin

FOREIGN TRADE
By H.R. Knickerbocker, correspondent of the New York Evening Post, Berlin

THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA AND THE UNION OF SOCIALIST SOVIET REPUBLICS
By Walter DurantyThere's five more books that I'm going to scan in the next two days as well, all "Stalinist" (two by CPGB members J.R. Campbell and Andrew Rothstein, two by American journalist Anna Louise Strong, and one by an Old Bolshevik named Vyacheslav Karpinsky.)

[Creative Destruction]

I went ahead and processed this book, to make it more readable. I split the pages and ran it through an OCR program:

https://archive.org/details/RedEconomics20150110

It's PDF right now, but I'll add the EPUB version, so people can put it on their tablets or kindles if they have one.

[RedKobra]

Thanks for this, I've only gone through the introduction so far but it looks extremely interesting. I know Duranty's name is mud these days but its still an incredible historical record.

[Ismail]

I know Duranty's name is mud these days but its still an incredible historical record.I have basically the only biography on him, Stalin's Apologist by S.J. Taylor. As negative as she is towards him, she has high regard for his reporting on the NEP period. It's forgotten that Duranty's during the 20s was seen as one of the few objective and prescient reporters in Moscow, even by people who shit all over him for his 1930s reports on the Ukraine and whatnot. He was one of the few to point out that the NEP wasn't "the Bolsheviki admitting that communism has failed," but a temporary retreat.

His presence in Red Economics is restricted to the intro and the last chapter on US-Soviet relations anyway so yeah.


I went ahead and processed this book, to make it more readable. I split the pages and ran it through an OCR programIt'd be nice to know how you did that so I could apply it to future book scans.

[Creative Destruction]

It'd be nice to know how you did that so I could apply it to future book scans.

Sure!

I used two programs. It's kind of a pain in the ass, but I use Linux and there's always going to be a degree of difficulty when using Linux vs. Windows. These programs are available to Windows, but there may be a better alternative. Anyway...

I loaded the PDF into a program called g2scanpdf (http://gscan2pdf.sourceforge.net/). You don't do anything in this program except once all the pages have been loaded, you then save them as jpgs or tiffs.

Once you have your jpg or tiff files, you load that into another program called ScanTailor (http://scantailor.org/). (The reason for converting the file format is because ScanTailor does not accept PDF files.) On the ScanTailor menu, it gives you a menu of options. You'll be asked, in the beginning, to set an input and output folder. For the input, you just drill down to the folder where the images are and it'll import them from there. The program will automatically create its own output folder.

First, you want to click on Split Pages. This'll make single pages that will be easily read on a PDF viewer or on an ebook device. You can manipulate it how you want, but the program's sense of where to split the pages is generally good. There's a button labelled "Apply To..." which will launch a box. You select "All" under the "Pages" label and hit "OK." Then, when you hover over the menu of options there'll be a Play button in grey. Click on that, and it'll split all the pages.

Second, you want to go to the Output section of the menu. There'll be a drop down that gives you three options: Black & White, Color and Mixed. You can probably get away with "Black & White" in this case, but in most cases, Mixed is your best bet if you're just dealing with things like pictures that can be rendered in greyscale. Anyway, you select that, do the "Apply To.." thing again and hit the Play button again.

Now, you can't save anything except for the project itself. But the pages will be individually saved in the program-created output folder.

You'll go back into gscan2pdf, load all the files from the output folder, then save them all as a single PDF this time. And then that's your final product. From there, you can take a program like Calibre and further convert that PDF into EPUB, MOBI or whatever else you want to.

Hopefully that wasn't too confusing. I have a feeling that once you start doing the process, what I'm saying will become clearer.

[Ismail]

I use Windows for practical reasons, so unfortunately I can't use that g2scanpdf program, but thanks for mentioning it. My scanner doesn't have Black & White for some reason (I know it makes for shorter file sizes and makes texts easier to read), only color and grayscale. I use PDF24 Creator to actually make the PDFs, which is very easy to do (insert files, set quality to medium so that filesize isn't ginormous, create PDF) but it doesn't do anything other than just take scanned pages as they are, it doesn't split them or anything helpful like that.

[Creative Destruction]

Well, your scanner should be putting out jpgs or tiffs in the first place. As long as you have those, you can forego g2scanpdf and just load them into ScanTailor. Then once you have the output files from ScanTailor, you can create your PDF with PDF24 Creator.

I could also just go ahead and do it for you with the single PDF file you upload. It doesn't take too much time on my system (and I know how much of a pain in the ass it is actually scanning the thing in), and I'm really big into helping with archiving projects and book liberation.