Amsterdam, October 2026
Dear friend,
The last time the world translated its ancient wisdom, it ignited the Renaissance. I think we can do it again.
Just after the arrival of the printing press, Cosimo de’ Medici commissioned Marsilio Ficino to translate ancient Greek and African wisdom texts into Latin. These ancient ideas lit up Europe and sparked what we know of as the Renaissance.
Source Library began when I learned that I couldn’t read Marsilio Ficino’s own philosophical works, because most of the Renaissance itself has never been translated. Debora Shuger, a Renaissance scholar at UCLA, estimates that “90 percent of the Latin texts from the Renaissance have never been available in translation” (UCLA, 2012). At current rates of human translation, it would take more than 10,000 years to finish it all.
And, of course, there is so much more than Latin: massive bodies of untranslated texts in Chinese, Sanskrit, Tibetan, Arabic, Hebrew and dozens of other languages.
At the onset of Superintelligence, we want to make sure that all ancient source texts are available to AI, and to people through AI.
How can you trust it? Every translation is shown next to the scanned page it came from, so you can check any line against the original before you quote it. All of it is free under a Creative Commons share-alike license, and it is open by API and MCP, which means the AI assistant you use can look up the actual page instead of guessing at it.
Today, Source Library holds about 93,000 books in over fifty languages. Nearly 20,000 of them can already be read in translation, nearly five million pages, most of them in English for the first time. The other 73,000 are scanned and cataloged but not yet readable. To get a sense of the scale, the library already holds more words than English Wikipedia.
Source Library is based at the Embassy of the Free Mind in Amsterdam, home of the Bibliotheca Philosophica Hermetica, a UNESCO “Memory of the World” rare-book library. It has a Guinness record for the largest library devoted to magic and mysticism. Here is a picture of the bust of Marsilio Ficino that watches over the Source Library translation work.
What we need to finish
Source Library has been a labor of love and now we want to open it up so that others can pour theirs in, through contributions of time and funding.
When it comes to funding, we’ve raised $60,000 so far from two incredible donors, but have spent over $120,000 to make this resource free and open. It is my hope to find other donors who want to help participate in the largest historical translation project in history. We can, of course, offer in return our good karma, amazing parties, and specially collected rare books from our collection.
Let me share more about our costs. To run something the size of Wikipedia, we have monthly costs for hosting, databases and processing. Hosting alone is about $3,000 per month; at full working pace, with the AI translation running, it is $11,000 to $15,000 per month, not including any human labor. On AI translation, we’ve spent about $85,000 in tokens so far, on some 20,000 books. Since then the cost has fallen sharply: a single pass now costs under a dollar a book. We budget $5 a book so that every book is re-read as better models arrive, the hard scripts get special handling, and scholars can check the results. Everything so far has been done entirely by volunteers.
Where we will be in 2031
Here is what exists at the end of five years, if this is funded.
- On the order of a million books readable in translation: every ancient source text that anyone has scanned, from the Renaissance Latin that was never translated to the Chinese, Sanskrit, Tibetan and Arabic corpora, open to anyone and to AI.
- Every line checkable against its scan. Translation and original side by side, on every page of every book.
- The core of the tradition in scholarly editions, reviewed by experts language by language and citable by DOI.
- The Embassy’s three thousand undigitized books scanned and translated, two thousand of which exist in no other collection, with collections from partner libraries in India, Indonesia and elsewhere joining on the same open terms.
- A global stewardship community of amateur and professional scholars who decide what belongs, correct and annotate the translations, and keep the archive improving every year instead of going stale.
- A foundation that runs it, with the staff, the reserve and the legal footing to keep every page online for the long term.
The plan, year by year
Three phases. Each one ends with a promise you can check.
- Year 1
Read everything we hold
$762,000We hold another 73,000 books, sixteen million pages, that nobody can read yet. They are already scanned and cataloged. Today the pipeline runs on a budget of $5 a day. At full speed, about two million pages a month, which is the most we have ever run, the AI costs $8,000 to $12,000 a month on top of about $3,000 a month for hosting, and everything we hold is read in about nine months: the OCR, the translation, the illustrations, and the scripts that need special handling, such as Tibetan and Syriac. Quality comes first: each kind of page gets the engine that reads it best in our measurements, and the hardest pages are read twice. The reading plan shows what that costs and what we are still testing.
The rest of the first year builds the organization that makes those translations trustworthy: the foundation and its legal footing, a director, a part-time engineer to run the pipeline, and the hosting that keeps every page online.
By next summer, every one of the 93,000 books we hold has a first translation, and there is an organization responsible for it.
- Years 2–3
Read the world’s scanned record, and make it trustworthy
about $540,000 a yearFar more has been scanned than we hold. HathiTrust, the Internet Archive, Gallica, the Munich Digitization Center and the Tibetan and Chinese digital libraries hold millions of volumes that nobody can read. We bring them in shelf by shelf, starting with Renaissance Latin, Chinese, Sanskrit and Arabic. At today’s rates each additional 100,000 books costs $60,000 to $175,000 to read, depending on how carefully each page is checked, and the shelf and language gifts below scale that directly.
It is important for scholars to check the translations against the originals, language by language. That starts with Renaissance Latin, and the core works become scholarly editions with DOIs, so they can be cited.
At the Embassy of the Free Mind, there are about three thousand books printed before 1920 that have no digital copy anywhere, and some two thousand of them exist in no other collection. Scanning them at the Embassy, at its own pace and rates, is another $550,000, and we translate them as they come off the scanner.
The stewardship community begins here: reviewers, annotators and translators who take responsibility for a language, a tradition or a shelf, and whose corrections flow back into the texts.
By the end of year three, several hundred thousand books are readable, the Embassy’s unique holdings are online, and the most important texts carry an expert’s review.
- Years 4–5
A million books, alive
about $540,000 a yearOur vision is not merely to get everything “done” and walk away. We want to create a living archive, something that can improve and evolve over time. Translations are re-read as AI improves, and the community’s work is what keeps them honest.
The library comes out in Spanish, Arabic and Hindi, expert-reviewed. Then, there are books and manuscripts in libraries in India, in Indonesia and in libraries all around the world. We want to open these up and make them available for all the world, for all time.
The foundation builds its reserve and an endowment path, so the archive outlives its founders.
By the end of year five, a living archive on the order of a million books, stewarded by a global community, improving every year.
Over five years it comes to $2.9 million: $2.5 million for the work itself and $400,000 to run the organization that does it. The first year needs $762,000, and each year after that about $540,000. The line-by-line budget is below.
So here is the ask. The first year needs $762,000, and it buys something you can check: by next summer, every book we hold has a first translation, and there is an organization responsible for it. Simply keeping the library running at its current pace, while that is raised, takes about $150,000 to $200,000 for the coming year.
If you want to participate in this historical project, please reach out. I would be happy to arrange a time online or on location at the Embassy of the Free Mind.
With gratitude,
