Frequently Asked Questions

The pitch of this project is something along the lines of 'What if the original author had written this book today with the help of an editor to make it more accessible to a wider audience?' The goal is not simply a summary of the book, but a version of the book that preserves the author's original voice, style, and rigor while making the text more modern and accessible. This is made possible by the advances in AI and the ability to use the original text as a reference.

We don't intend to, but acknowledge that large language models have an inherent amount of randomness to them. We take strides to ensure it is very clear within the requests that we make to the language models to leave the core essence of the book intact, and will do our best to make manual fixes if we discover that this has occurred.

Frankly, we are currently focusing on books that we would like to read. We are also open to suggestions from the community. As of now, we are focused only on non-fiction books as we feel that fiction will deserve a different kind of process that we have not thought through yet.

Currently, our modernizations are available in digital format through our website. These include PDF, Markdown, and EPUB for use with a variety of digital readers. We are exploring adding audiobooks in the future. .

The 'Modernized' version focuses on making the language and style of the piece more contemporary, and edits the piece to make it more concise and readable. The 'Annotated' Version takes the modernized version and adds several accompanying bits of annotation, including; a pre-chapter introduction which provides useful details to situate the reader; inline annotations to explain difficult bits; and an end of chapter summary to help the reader review what they just read. .

We aim to be as transparent as possible with all of the changes that happened to the original text. For each text, we show the full pipeline transformations that the book went through. This includes what models were used, along with the prompts. Further, there is a feature that allows you to see the original text against the modernized text to that you can see exactly what was changed.

All of the modernized works are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. This means that you are free to share and adapt the work, but you must give attribution to the original modernization. You are also not allowed to use the work for commercial purposes.

We track changes to the modernized book over time using version numbers in the format major.minor. The major number indicates a complete modernization, while the minor number denotes manual updates that correct any errors the AI model may have introduced. New major versions are rare—they occur only when there's been a significant advance in our AI models that enables a noticeably better modernization, or when we determine an existing version isn't working and rerun the process in hopes of achieving a better result.

We welcome feedback! You can contact us through our contact form or email us directly. We review all suggestions and corrections to continuously improve our modernizations. We also have a Github repository both for the program that generates the modernized books as well as for this website. Any issues or suggestions can also be used there.

The cost of each modernization is dependent on the length of the book and which models we use for the process. Typically, we aim for no more than $10-$20 per book.

Reading the books is the best support! If you spot areas where the model has altered the original's tone or made simple errors in grammar, punctuation, or formatting, please let us know so we can correct them. We also welcome anyone willing to use this program to modernize other public-domain titles. Each book requires unique setup and has associated costs with running the AI models, so if you're able to invest the time and cover those costs for books you care about, you'll greatly help us expand this library of modernized works.