What this site knows

There are no accounts, no cookies set by this site, and no analytics. Nothing you do while reading is sent to us, because there is no us to send it to: these pages are files on a server, and everything the library remembers about you it remembers inside your own browser.

What is kept, and where

Your reading position in each work, your annotations, your view settings, and where you are in a course are stored in your browser’s own storage — local storage for the small records, an in-browser database for the annotations. They stay on the device that made them. They do not sync between your devices, and we cannot read them.

The direct consequence: clearing your browser’s site data for this domain erases your annotations and your places, and there is no copy anywhere else. That is the price of not holding your reading on a server, and it is the trade this library has chosen deliberately.

The two things that do leave

The interface typeface is served by Adobe Fonts, whose licence does not permit self-hosting. Loading a page therefore makes one request to Adobe, which sees what such a request always shows: your address and which page asked. The reading face is served from this site and makes no such request.

The server keeps ordinary web logs. Requesting a page tells the host that a page was requested, from where, at what time — the record any web server keeps in order to be a web server. It is not joined to anything else, because there is nothing else.

If you write to us

A message sent to an address on the contact page is an email, and is kept the way email is kept. Course correspondence goes to the instructor of record and is that institution’s to hold.

Changes

If what the site stores or what it requests changes, this page changes with it. It describes the software as it is, not as a policy hopes it might be.