When I started this project, I chose public domain books because of cost initially. To sell ebooks with one of the large distributors, it would have required me to guarantee a certain number of sales. I could not do that. Also, I did not want to pay for any memberships and store fees like Indie Commerce from the American Booksellers Association.
I had thought about building a large online site before focused on libraries. I had seen that Minecraft had a site called The Uncensored Library, which was about freedom of information. I had become interested in the concept of libraries inside games. There were many games with libraries inside them.
Initially I started by trying to see if I could do anything with Unity, which is a game engine. I had seen that people were building storefronts inside Unity. I thought it would be possible to build a customized library in Unity. This was a real possibility in terms of funding, because if you were earning less than $200,000 from Unity, you could access it for free with a personal account.
What ultimately pushed me to start working on my project was that I was reading The Library of Babel by Jorge Luis Borges, which is a short story written in 1941. I realized that the hexagonal galleries in the Library of Babel did not have to be filled with random books — they could be replaced with other content, like public domain books.
I tried a variety of different coding engines at the very basic level, ChatGPT and Google Gemini, but I found that I needed to work with a more powerful engine, which I would have to pay for. I ended up using Replit. Still, I had to keep costs down. I wanted to use BISAC (Book Industry Standards and Communications) initially; however, there would have been a fee to do this. Also, the Dewey Decimal Classification is owned by OCLC and requires licensing. The Library of Congress classification system is public domain. I ended up choosing this because of costs.
I had seen that it was possible to display books, but again, I was limited by my programming skills. My goal became to create a proof of concept. Initially the project was to be an infinite tesseract. When I tried this, the program instead built a loop going automatically back to an empty hexagon. I was able to build a hexagon with four walls and two exits that looped back on itself.
Instead of trying to put everything into the galleries, it was necessary to limit the content. The answer was to curate the content and focus on core books: pick out the most important books to be added to the collection, initially focusing on classic titles and primary sources. I would pick out the initial subject for the hexagons, then add selected titles to create a core collection of subjects and books which came from the public domain.
The hexagons would then be mapped onto something called a Cortex Map, an idea from the book The World Brain by H.G. Wells. H.G. Wells had proposed a global cortex, or universal encyclopedia. This project is not completely practical. I have been continuously working on updating the subject hexagons. The Cortex Map shows the different hexagons which have been added. I have had requests by people who use the site for hexagons for ceramics, visual art, and women's literature. In addition to hexagons with multiple titles, I have had requests for individual titles, like Relativity: The Special and General Theory by Albert Einstein. I generally provide the title, author, date, and link to the public domain source for a particular title to be added.
I plan ahead before I add new hexagons. I am planning to add a new hexagon on fairy tales soon. I have a list of the titles which I have identified as being in the Internet Archive, Standard Ebooks, HathiTrust, or another public domain source. It has taken time to figure out how to link to different titles. Some sources have rate limits on how many titles can be viewed from a particular site. The Internet Archive is one site that does not have any limits on how many items you can view.