How this works

A library is a carrier bag. Nothing in it is a weapon. Here is how the shelf is governed, in plain words, so you can read the rules for yourself.

What the shelf never does

• No account is needed to browse, read, listen, or print. There is nothing to sign up for.
• Nothing tracks what you read, search, or take. Counts are page-level at most, never tied to a person.
• No format is gated by a diagnosis or a proof of disability. The large print, the audio, and the plain language are open to everyone, for any reason, including none.
• There is no AI on this site that talks to children. None.
• Nothing is recommended by watching your behavior. The shelf is chosen by people and offered whole.
• Nothing is assigned, graded, gamified, streaked, or badged. It is a gift, not a product.
• There are no ads. The one commercial thread — a disclosed affiliate code on buy links — sends every cent to sourcing home-language editions.

How books are presented

Every title falls into one of three lanes, and the lane decides what this page may show. Our own writing is offered in full and freely. Verified public-domain work can be presented whole, translated, and recorded. Everything still in copyright gets only our own synopsis and our own note on why it belongs, with the doors out to borrow it or buy it — never the chapters, never the whole poem, never a machine translation of someone else's work.

Languages, done rightly

Our own writing and public-domain texts are carried into other languages by a pipeline that always ends with a person: a facilitator from within that language community reads the translation and signs it before it publishes. Machine output never publishes unreviewed. Original scripts lead on every card, because the display order is itself a statement about whose language leads.

The doors out

The library never sells a book and never hosts a copyrighted one. Every card ends in doors, ordered by our values: borrow first — through Libby and your Seattle or King County library — then the accessible services for readers with print disabilities, then buy local through Bookshop.org, which routes money to independent bookstores. Where a buy link earns a small commission, all of it funds the hunt for the home-language editions that are hardest to find.

If any of this does not fit your hands, that is our problem to fix, not yours. Tell us.