About ybooks

The rule

Every factual claim here carries its source. Every study carries the reason it proves less than a headline would suggest. Every quote names the work and the year, and the ones that could not be traced are printed in a list of things nobody actually said rather than quietly dropped.

This is not fastidiousness for its own sake. A page arguing that books make you better informed loses if it is itself sloppy about who said what — and almost every page like this one is.

Where the reading data comes from

rcmnd is a sibling project that collects public recommendations under a single rule: a verbatim quote and a source URL, or it does not exist. Nothing in it is paraphrased and nothing is inferred. A watcher reads public posts on a timer; a model is allowed to find a sentence and never to write one, and every candidate is checked character-for-character against the original post before it is stored.

ybooks reads that database and shows you only the books. rcmnd also tracks hardware, software, podcasts and courses, and has two siblings: korrents for what a person believes and ppll for where a person publishes.

What "notable" means here

It means: a named person, with a public record, who wrote the sentence being quoted under their own name. It does not mean famous, and it is not a judgement that their taste is better than yours. The value of a recommendation is that you can see exactly who made it and go read the rest of what they think.

Corrections

A wrong quote, a broken source link, a study characterised badly — these are worth fixing and the whole site is built so they can be. If you find one, the record it came from is linked on every card; the fix belongs upstream in rcmnd for reading data, and here for everything on the why and quotes pages.

Colophon

Server-rendered on a Cloudflare Worker, reading Cloudflare D1. No client-side framework, no analytics, no cookies, no tracking, no ads, nothing to sign up for. Roughly 20 KB per page because the product is text.