About
About The Living Library
The Living Library began with a simple frustration: that the usual way to engage with a great book is to read a summary of it. Summaries tell you what a book said. They don't let you ask it anything.
Who's behind it
Jason Plant
Company Director, The Living Library
Jason Plant is Company Director of The Living Library, the reading room where you can put a question to any book and get an answer in its own voice. He built it, runs it, and writes the reading guides here — working from public-domain texts and named translations rather than second-hand summaries.
I'm not a philosopher and this didn't start with a personal awakening. It started with a gap. The two ways most people engage with a great book online are both poor: read a summary that tells you what it said, or open the thing cold with no idea where to begin and quietly give up around page fifteen.
There was an obvious third option that nobody had built properly — let people ask the book. Bring it the actual problem, in your own words, and get an answer in the book's voice rather than a paraphrase of its Wikipedia entry. So I built it, and the reading guides on this site came out of the same idea: tell people the things a summary never does, like which translation to buy and which chapter to skip.
How we source things
Every passage quoted on this site comes from a translation that is out of copyright, and we name the translator and the year. Where a modern translation is better — and it usually is — we say so and point you to it rather than reproducing it.
Where scholars genuinely disagree, we say that too. You'll find that on the pages for The Prince, The Republic and The Science of Getting Rich, among others. A book page that pretends a contested question is settled isn't worth reading.
The conversations on this site are AI responses written in the spirit of each book. They are not the authors, they are not channelling anyone, and they will tell you so if you ask. For matters of faith, health, law or money, speak to a qualified person rather than a language model.
What you can do here
- Browse the library — every book you can talk to.
- Read the guides — where to start with each one.
- Start a conversation — name a book and ask it something.