Publishing for the Modern World

Typical reading experience of today

Traditionally, books are printed on paper and sold in bookstores. From the readers' point of view, they cost too much, are hard to carry around, and contain plain text, at best accompanied by some nice illustrations but ultimately limited by the book size and the print quality.

The typical electronic book is just a poor copy of a printed one, that is, plain text, often badly formatted. I've never seen a decent illustration in a pdf or epub file, let alone video or something interactive.

But reading isn't a natural process, so who said plain text is the best way of conveying information?

Let technology do its work

Some people just stick to physical books and that's fine, but the majority reads from a screen, undoubtedly.

I suggest we just do it better.

Imagine a book about architecture having an interactive 3D model that the reader can tinker with.

Imagine a cookbook that features a video and a neat calculator per recipe, so that people can follow along and know how much milk or flour they need for 7 servings.

Imagine a music theory book that allows people to actually play around and hear the notes.

Interactive graphics, 3D, audio, video — indeed anything that's programmable and helps the reader engage with the subject.

Note-taking as per Zettelkasten and optional integration with Obsidian (not endorsed by them in any way, just a popular piece of software for organizing notes).

Synced progress between all your devices.

No more freaking subscriptions

I pay too many of them already. I bet you do too.

Hiding a book behind a paywall is evil. Books contain cultural, spiritual, engineering etc. knowledge, the only true treasure that humankind has amassed, so it's our duty to make it available to everyone.

Everyone wins. A boy in Pakistan or a girl in Brazil reads a book for free, gets inspired for life, and here you have a new Tesla or Ramanujan.

That's how I see it at least.

Also... I can't help but wonder — how much of the creative work that's done today is truly original? If I write a song, I take advantage of music theory, musical instruments, electronics, software, social media platforms, I get inspired by the music of previous generations, so how big is my unique addition after all?

Artificial Intelligence makes things even weirder. If I compose a song with some AI software, who gets the credit? The LLM creator? The audio software creator? The human musical heritage as a whole, since the model had to train on it? Or is it me who wrote the prompt?

As I see it, knowledge is naturally shared, and the right way to reward creative work is to let people support it freely.

Anágnosis will never have ad banners or paywalls; every feature is and will be fully available to everyone regardless of their income.

The project as a whole and each authored (i.e. not in the public domain) book in particular will have its own donation streams, so whoever enjoys it can give however much they want.

The former is for me as the owner and creator, and the latter is 100% for the authors; no more cents per dollar as in traditional publishing. If readers give you a million, a million you get (minus transaction costs of whatever payment service we'll be using, of course).

Reach a wider audience

Technology doesn't stop at interactivity.

Modern AI is decent at translation and can do the heavy lifting, especially for non-fiction. It's usually been cumbersome to translate a book into another language, let alone publish it in a different region.

Here you can translate your content into a bunch of popular languages fast, and bring in a native speaker to polish the rough edges afterwards.

Suddenly a cuisine or interior design book is available in 10 languages, with a few billion people able to read it (and donate!).