A note on the text
Every edition on this site is a public-domain work rewritten, sentence by sentence, into clear modern English. This page says how that is done, what it is good for, and where its limits are.
Why
The site began with one reader trying, and failing, to get through Meditations, The Wealth of Nations, and The Art of War in their standard English translations. The ideas were not the obstacle; the sentences were. Rewriting a whole work into the prose of a good contemporary essay, without cutting or summarizing anything, turned out to be the difference between abandoning a book and finishing it.
How an edition is made
An edition passes through six stages. The first and fifth are deterministic; the others call a language model that the person running the pipeline supplies from their own account.
- Extract. The public-domain EPUB is parsed into its parts and catalogued.
- Select. The author's own chapters are chosen; publisher notes, front matter, and back matter are excluded. Each chapter is cut into passages at sentence boundaries.
- Rewrite. Every passage is rewritten into modern English with its neighbouring passages as context for continuity. The instructions ask for authoritative explanatory prose, forbid clichés and commentary, and forbid replacing the author's examples with modern ones.
- Check. Every rewrite is compared with its source passage for dropped content, changed meaning, summarizing, and stray commentary. A passage that fails is revised against the specific finding and checked again, at most twice. If it still fails, the edition stops there; nothing unresolved is published.
- Assemble. The passages are stitched back into one text and the headings normalised.
- Publish. The book's description and metadata are written, the page and EPUB are generated, and a cover is drawn.
The prompts, the stage code, and the checks are all in the public repository, so anyone can read exactly what the model was asked to do and rerun it.
What an edition is not
It is not a translation by a scholar and it is not a summary. It is a machine's modern reading of the whole work, checked by a machine against the original. That makes it excellent for understanding an argument from end to end, and wrong for citation. When a sentence matters, quote the original and say which translation you used.
The narrations, where they exist, are generated speech from the edition text. They are for listening, not for reference.
Open source, and how to help
The site, the pipeline, and the 28 editions are published under an open licence on GitHub. You can report a passage that reads wrongly, propose a work, or add an edition yourself: run the pipeline locally with your own model account, check the result, and open a pull request with the source notes the contributing guide asks for. Every change is reviewed before it reaches the site.
Questions
How faithful is an edition to the original?
Every passage of the original is rewritten, and every rewrite is compared against its source passage for dropped content, changed meaning, summarizing, and added commentary. A passage that fails is revised and checked again, up to twice; one that still fails is never published. That is a strong check, not a guarantee: the rewriting and the checking are both done by language models. Treat an edition as a way into the work, and go to the original when a sentence will carry weight.
Why not just read the original?
You should, when you can. These editions exist for the reader who has tried Locke or Kant or Adam Smith in the original and given up on the sentence structure, not the ideas. A modern reading gets you through the whole argument; the original is still there afterwards.
What does it cost?
Nothing. There is no account, subscription, or newsletter. Read on the site, download the EPUB, or listen to the narration where one exists.
Can I use an edition in a class, a book club, or a project?
Yes. The originals are in the public domain and the editions are free to read and share. Credit the site and link to the edition so readers can find the source notes.
How are books chosen?
They are public-domain works of lasting argument, mostly philosophy, politics, economics, and science, whose language is the main thing standing between a modern reader and the ideas. Fiction is not on the shelf yet.
Can I suggest a book, or add one myself?
Both. Write to us below with a suggestion. If you want to add one yourself, the pipeline is open source: you run it locally with your own model account and open a pull request with the result and its source notes.
Write to us
Suggestions, corrections, and questions are welcome. A reply may take a few days.