The Story So Far

or “About libra.re, part II” #

Before I dive into it in subsequent posts, I want to share a bit of the story of how this project came to be. What compelled me to start? Why am I doing this?

There’s gonna be a lot of “I” and “my” in here, inevitably. Your patience and indulgence are much appreciated.

Books have surrounded me all my life. I’m one of those people who’s bookshelves are an important part of their world. I have always had books lying around, stacks and piles here and there, multiple tomes in varying states and stages of reading-ness.

My first eink reader device was a 2010 Kindle DX, the dark grey one with the keyboard. I kinda ignored it for a while. I was too busy pursuing a career as a designer, then at Nokia. It was an amazing time for me. I got to dance with world-class designers, in an “insight and foresight” culture. It refined how I think about and approach design: critically and inquisitively.

As my time at Nokia wound down, I started reading more again. I dusted off the Kindle, got a few ebooks. And… I found myself completely lost and disoriented in the experience, almost immediately.

While many spoke of the eink screen quality, the bookstore selection, or the ecosystem lock-in, I had an additional problem. My discomfort lay, upon introspection, with the broader context of “living with books.”

After acquiring the 5th or 6th ebook I realized I already didn’t know what I had anymore. I’d forgotten what I had read, if I’d finished anything or if I had any notes. I had only a passing, merely textual and fragmented memory of the books. I also had no memory of reading them: where and when, etc…

There was “no there, there.” The ebooks did not exist in my life, the way physical books always had. To me, that meant they didn’t fulfill their basic value proposition, and I mean that not only in commercial terms.

I am not one of those people who fetishizes physical media over digital—quite the opposite. My immediate thought was: “ok, how can information technology address some of this lack of broader cognitive engagement?”

Here’s how I phrased it in 2017:

Libra.re is about establishing a certain angle of inquiry. “What sort of rudimentary digital experience that begins to explore recovering some of the tangible, spatial, temporal, social experiences I miss from not having my ebooks in my physical environment?” Reading and buying aside, this is about the “having” of books, the living with them and their content, my annotations, and my memories of them, of interacting with them, of “having them around.”

I’ve been building stuff on the Web since the mid-90s, so naturally I started exploring using web-based technologies.

Soon enough, I had built a few experiences which were kinda interesting, kinda compelling. I started to get a real sense of the library of ebooks—the elibrary—I had started to build.

I showed what I had done to an old friend of mine—Hugh McGuire—who at the time had already spent considerable effort talking about and building tech for ebooks. He had even published an O’Reilly book about it, and was (and still is) running a web-based ebook publication service. Based on what I’d shown him, and the many excited conversations that followed, we founded the Rebus Foundation which, generously funded by The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, pursued web-based academic textbook creation.

A few years later now, and I find myself returning to my old project. Nothing seems to have really changed in the ebook world, and if anything it’s gotten worse.

But I sense something in the air. The time may be right to push the conversation again. So I’ve updated my codebase, refreshed the design… and am ready to start exploring again.

This time, I am going to do it in the open. I can’t have a conversation just with myself and expect things to happen.

So, enough context and preamble. If you’d like to be informed when I start, use the links and the sign-up form in the footer of this page to follow and subscribe.

Thank you.