What is this?

Frank Knight's Risk, Uncertainty, and Profit (1921) is one of the most important works in economic theory. It introduced the foundational distinction between measurable risk and true uncertainty, shaped modern thinking about entrepreneurship and profit, and remains essential reading for students of economics, business, and law.

The original 1921 text is in the public domain. But until now, no clean, readable digital edition existed. The available scans are low quality, and existing OCR transcriptions are riddled with errors.

A small-scale Gutenberg Project

This project is inspired by Project Gutenberg, but on a much smaller scale: one book, restored through a combination of AI-assisted OCR cleanup and human review. The text you see was reconstructed from multiple OCR scans of the original 1921 edition, cross-referenced and corrected using both automated tools and manual editing.

It is a work in progress. OCR artifacts remain. Some paragraphs may be mis-broken, some words garbled, some footnotes misplaced. Please have patience with the current state and confidence that it will improve — each fix makes the text better for everyone who reads it after you.

How you can help

• Select any text that looks wrong — a garbled word, a broken sentence, a missing paragraph break — and click the yellow flag that appears.
• In the popup, you can optionally suggest what the text should say.
• Click Send Fix to open a pre-filled email in your mail app. The email goes to the project editor. Your email address is never collected or stored by this website.
• Even a bare flag with no suggestion helps — it tells us where to look.

Single source of truth

The text is stored as a single Markdown file. When corrections are incorporated, a new version is published and this page updates automatically. You can always download the latest version using the link in the sidebar.

v0.3.0 — April 2026

Maintained by Seth C. Oranburg, Catholic University of America, Columbus School of Law.