Frank Knight published Risk, Uncertainty and Profit in 1921. The book gave economics one of its most useful distinctions: risk is what you can compute, uncertainty is what you cannot. Insurers price risk. Entrepreneurs absorb uncertainty. The premium on entrepreneurship is what is left over after the calculable contingencies are insured against.

The book is in the public domain. Every digital edition I have found contains errors. Some are scanned and OCR-mangled. Some have been reset by typists who silently introduced changes. Some have had headers and footers stripped, sometimes including the footnotes the headers indexed. For a text that has shaped business law, financial regulation, and the theory of the firm for over a century, that is an embarrassing state of affairs.

This is a problem for a treatise that draws on Knight, which mine does. It is a larger problem for the discipline of business law, which uses Knight’s distinction without ever quite agreeing on what page to cite.

The Business Associations companion site now hosts a restoration project at oranburg.law/BA/RUP. The text is being cleaned up against the 1921 first edition, with paragraph-level provenance and footnotes corrected where digital editions have lost or scrambled them. Contributors with access to a clean physical copy or a reliable scan are welcome. Pull requests, errata, and corrections are wanted.

When the restoration is complete it will be the canonical free digital edition. Knight deserves better than what is currently online. So do students of the discipline he helped found.