The Library — User Manual

263 books, free to read, no account needed.

The Library is a public-domain reading room. Take a book down, read it in the browser, and — if you want one — talk to a companion about what you are reading. Nothing is behind a paywall and nothing needs an account to read.

What an account buys is small and specific: your place in a book is kept, and the passages you mark are saved. Everything else works for a stranger.

The shelf

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Books stand as spines on a shelf, grouped by subject. The shelf holds 263 books today — 250 in English and 13 in Spanish — across literature, history, mathematics, philosophy, poetry, the sciences, civics and more.

Search takes a title, an author, or a subject. It is the fastest way in when you know roughly what you want.

The language chips appear only for languages actually on the shelf, so they never offer you an empty room. No chip selected means every language, not "English only" — the default on a mostly-English shelf has to be all of it.

The librarian is the chat beside the shelf. Describe what you are in the mood for — "something short and funny", "a book about how cities work" — and it recommends from what is actually here, then hands you the book: it can open the reading room with your choice already in it. It only ever recommends books on this shelf; it cannot suggest something we do not have.

What is on a spine

Each book carries its title, its author and the year. Open one and you also get its blurb, its source (almost always Project Gutenberg, with a link to the original), and its rights — every book here is public domain.

Some books carry a caution, and these are worth reading before the book. They are not warnings that a book is bad; they name something a reader should know. The Jungle Book carries "Imperialist author — worth discussing", which is a fair description of Kipling and not a reason to skip him.

Books also carry a coverage figure — the proportion of the original text that made it in. Anything under 70% is flagged. This exists because we found that 120 of 207 books had been silently truncated by an import cap: Anna Karenina held 24 chapters of 239 and nothing said so. The number is now computed on every import and shown, so you can tell a complete book from a partial one.

The reading room

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The book opens as a two-page spread. Turn pages with the arrows or the arrow keys; the chapter you are in is always addressable, so the browser Back button does what you expect and a chapter can be linked directly.

The controls

• The library (top left) — back to the shelf.
• Contents — every chapter, with the book's total page count.
• What I have marked — your notepad of saved passages. Members only.
• A− / A+ — type size, in five named steps from Small to Largest. It is a multiplier on the book's own setting, so headings and body text move together, and it is remembered.
• The palette — the light you are reading in: eight themes across Daylight (Paper, Cream, Sepia, Linen), Evening (Dusk) and Lights off (Night, Nocturne, Charcoal). Chosen for reading prose for an hour, not for glancing at chrome. Also remembered.
• Your place — signed in, the book remembers the page you left it on and offers to take you back. A guest is told plainly that it will not be kept.

Page numbers that are actually true

The page count is measured, not estimated. Every chapter is laid out in a hidden copy of the book's own columns, so within a few seconds of opening a book the numbers are facts and stop moving. Change the type size and they are recomputed rather than corrected — a different size is a different book, physically.

Marking a passage

Select any text and mark it. The quote is the author's and never changes; the comment beside it is yours and is the only editable part. Marks collect in What I have marked, which is a notepad of everything you have kept from that book, and they are found again by looking for the text rather than by a character offset — so a re-import of the book cannot silently move your highlight onto the wrong sentence.

Marks need an account. They are the first things in the library that are yours, which is the point of them.

The companion

Each book has a companion you can talk to while you read. Select a passage and ask about it, or just ask. It answers in your language, and it is reading the same book you are.

It is a reading companion, not a summariser: ask what a paragraph is doing, why a character behaves that way, what a word meant in 1894. It will not do your homework for you and is not trying to replace the book.

Honest limits

• The text is other people's. Everything here is public domain, mostly from Project Gutenberg, and we are a shelf rather than a publisher. Nothing on the shelf is authored by us — including a book we have adapted, because an adaptation of somebody else's book is still somebody else's book.
• A book we cannot legally host, we do not host. García Márquez, Borges, Cortázar, Rulfo, Neruda and Paz are all still in copyright in the US and will not appear here, however often they are asked for. What we can offer is the century before them, which is why the Spanish shelf looks the way it does.
• Some books are partial, and the coverage figure tells you which.
• OCR is imperfect. Gutenberg texts are good but not flawless; a book with unreviewed OCR is marked as such.
• Translations vary. Where a translation is old, partial or a loose recomposition rather than a translation, the book says so — the FitzGerald Rubáiyát is a recomposition and the Genji is partial, and both are labelled.

Questions people ask

Do I need an account? No, to read. Yes, to keep your place and your marks.

Can I read on a phone? Yes. The spread becomes a single column.

Can I download a book? The originals are on Project Gutenberg, linked from every book. We would rather send you to the source than pretend to be one.

Why is my favourite book missing? Either it is still in copyright, or we have not imported it yet. The first is permanent, the second is not — ask.