Frequently asked questions (24)
- What is the Babel Nexus Index?
- It is a visual library — a hand-curated knowledge graph of 53 subjects (called hexagonal galleries) holding 820 classic, public-domain works. Instead of a search box and a flat list, it lays knowledge out as a map of connected rooms you can walk through, following the lines that link one idea to the next.
- Is it free? Do I need an account?
- Yes, it is completely free — there is no pricing at all. Every book, the Nexus Oracle, Reading Trails, and every other feature costs nothing: no subscription, no trial, no premium tier, and no paywall. There is no sign-up, no login, and no personal data collected — just a URL you can bookmark, share, or refresh into the same place.
- Will Babel Nexus ever charge for access?
- No. There are no paid tiers planned, ever — the collection is public domain and the mission is public access. The Index was built by a career librarian on the belief that humanity’s public-domain heritage should never have a paywall between it and a reader; staying free is the premise of the project, not a feature of it. The only optional extra is a free email newsletter.
- Why is it called “Babel Nexus”?
- The name nods to Jorge Luis Borges’s “The Library of Babel,” the story that pictures the universe as endless hexagonal rooms of books. The Index draws on three thinkers: Borges (the hexagons), H. G. Wells (the World Brain — one place for all knowledge), and Vannevar Bush (the Memex — ideas linked along trails).
- How is this different from a search engine or Wikipedia?
- A search engine hands you links; an encyclopaedia hands you summaries. The Index gives you the primary works themselves — the actual books — organised by the historical reasoning that connects them, so you can trace how one subject grew out of another rather than reading about it second-hand.
- How do I navigate it?
- Three ways. The Visual Explorer shows each subject as a hexagon orbited by related ones — click a neighbour or an edge to move. The Dashboard’s Domain Map is a grid of every gallery you can click straight into. The Masterlists list every work on a floor, filterable by subject. If you are new, start with the 65-second tour, then pick any subject that catches your eye.
- Where should I start?
- Start with the 65-second tour on the homepage or the “How this Index works” page. It shows the three simplest moves: choose a subject, open a book, and follow a connection when you want to keep exploring. After that, the Dashboard is the quickest overview of the whole collection.
- What are the hexagonal galleries and the edges between them?
- A hexagonal gallery is a room devoted to a single subject — Astronomy, Epics, Philosophy. An edge is a line joining two galleries; it means one subject historically fed into or grew out of another, so you can follow the lineage instead of jumping around at random.
- What are the three floors, or levels?
- The collection is stacked in three tiers linked by staircases: Level I is science (21 galleries), Level II is literature (24 galleries), and Level III is wisdom — philosophy, history, law, religion, and more (8 galleries).
- What is the Nexus Oracle?
- It is an AI research assistant, powered by Google’s Gemini, that answers only from the works held in the Archive. It will not invent facts from the open web; every answer points back to real books in the collection. Ask it things like “trace the lineage from Euclid to Riemann” or “what does the Archive say about memory?”
- How does the Nexus Oracle actually work?
- Every question you ask is sent to the Oracle together with a map of the whole Archive — each gallery’s title, its central claims, and the titles of the books it shelves. The Oracle (Google’s Gemini model) reasons over that map and answers in measured prose, tracing how one gallery’s ideas lead to another’s. It is free to use, needs no account, and your questions are not stored or used to identify you.
- What are the Oracle’s limitations?
- The Oracle knows the shape of the collection — which books sit where and what each gallery argues — but it has not read the books themselves; for the full text you follow the link to the shelf and read the original. It answers only about the Archive, so it will decline questions about current events or the open web. Answers arrive as a few paragraphs of prose, and like any AI it can occasionally misjudge — the books it points to are the authority, not the Oracle.
- What can the Oracle do that a search box can’t?
- A search box matches words; the Oracle traverses connections. Ask it what links thermodynamics to political economy, where an idea was first written down, or for a reading order through a subject, and it will draw an associative trail across the floors — the kind of answer that spans a dozen galleries at once. It can also compose a Descriptive Index of the collection on request.
- What is a Reading Trail?
- A Reading Trail is a path you build by stringing at least two galleries or books together in an order that makes sense to you, then naming it and sharing it as a single link. It is Vannevar Bush’s “associative trail” made literal — a sequence of ideas that travels in one URL.
- Can I use the Index with a keyboard or screen reader?
- Yes. The main navigation, Reading Trails, book filters, and citation tools are keyboard-operable, with visible focus indicators, labelled fields, and dialogs that keep focus where it belongs. You can also use the “Skip to main content” link at the start of the page to move past navigation quickly.
- What does “public domain” mean, and can I actually read the books?
- Public domain means the works are old enough that no one holds the copyright, so they are free to read forever. Yes — click any title on a shelf and it opens in an in-page reader, with the full text pulled from Project Gutenberg, the Internet Archive, or Wikisource. No download, no account.
- Does it work on my phone?
- Yes. The Index is responsive on phones, tablets, and desktops. On a phone, the reader-first 2D experience keeps the map, book links, search, and Reading Trails easy to use; desktop visitors can also choose the immersive Visual Explorer. There is also a dedicated mobile version of the experience.
- Can I reuse the content, and who made the Index?
- The books themselves are public domain and free to reuse. The Index’s design, curation, and structure are a proprietary work — Copyright © 2026 Nishan Stepak, all rights reserved — so please get in touch about licensing before reusing those. It was designed and built by collection-development librarian Nishan Stepak.
- Is this a curated alternative to Project Gutenberg?
- In spirit, yes — think of it as a hand-picked front door to the big archives. Project Gutenberg holds some 70,000 raw files with no map; the Index is a curated selection of 820 classics chosen by a professional librarian and arranged into 53 themed galleries, so you browse a shaped collection instead of scrolling an undifferentiated list. When you open a book, the full text still comes from Gutenberg, the Internet Archive, or Wikisource — the Index adds the curation, the connections, and the map those archives don’t have. A full side-by-side of Gutenberg, Open Library, Standard Ebooks, and Public Domain Library lives at babelnexus.com/compare.
- How is it different from Open Library?
- Open Library is a catalogue: you search for a title you already know and borrow or read it. The Index works the other way around — it is built for discovery when you don’t yet know what to read. Every work here is free with no waitlist and no account, the collection is deliberately curated rather than comprehensive, and subjects are laid out as connected rooms so one great book leads you to the next. Gutenberg and Open Library solve storage and lookup; the Index solves curation and discovery.
- Is there an interactive map of classic literature?
- Yes — two, in fact. The Visual Explorer renders each subject as a hexagonal room whose doorways lead to historically related subjects, and the Cortex Map draws an entire floor — all its galleries and every connection between them — as one clickable diagram. Together they turn 820 classic works into a landscape you can survey and wander instead of a list you scroll.
- Can I ask an AI about classic books here?
- Yes. The Nexus Oracle is an AI scholar grounded exclusively in this collection: ask it a question in plain language — “what connects thermodynamics to political economy?” — and it reasons across the floors and points you to the actual books, with links to read them. Because it is anchored to a hand-curated library rather than the open web, its answers end in real, free, readable texts instead of vague summaries.
- Can I get themed collections of classics instead of one big list?
- That is exactly how the Index is organised. Each of the 53 galleries is a themed, hand-picked collection — First Horror, Wordless Novels, Fables, Shakespeare, Statistics — and Reading Trails let you follow (or build and share) an ordered path of works across galleries. Every book links to a free full text, and the source archives offer formats like EPUB and PDF for offline reading.
- How do I cite or share a specific page?
- Every gallery, every individual work, and every Reading Trail has its own stable, shareable URL. Whatever you are looking at, the address bar holds a link you can copy, bookmark, or cite — and it will open other visitors to the same place.
Weighing the big free-book sites? See the honest side-by-side of Project Gutenberg, Open Library, Standard Ebooks, Public Domain Library & the Babel Nexus Index.