Inquiry Institute

A library for the
long conversation

Fourteen source archives. Over 76,000 cataloged texts across every major intellectual tradition.
A reader built for marginalia, annotation, and deep study.

76,000+ Cataloged texts
14 Source archives
177 Faculty bookshelves

Collections

Primary sources from every major intellectual tradition, curated by faculty and organized for serious study.

East Asia

Chinese Text Project

Confucian, Daoist, Legalist, and Mohist classics. The Analects, Tao Te Ching, Art of War, I Ching, Records of the Grand Historian, and the full breadth of pre-modern Chinese thought.

East Asia

Korean Classics

Neo-Confucian scholarship of Toegye and Yulgok, Silhak practical learning, sijo poetry, and classical fiction from the Institute for the Translation of Korean Classics.

East Asia

National Diet Library

Digitized Japanese literary, historical, and cultural materials from Japan's national repository.

Central Asia

Buddhist Digital Resource Center

The world's largest Buddhist text archive. Kangyur, Tengyur, and commentarial literature spanning the Tibetan canonical tradition.

Persianate World

Persian & Iranian Sources

Ganjoor poetry corpus — Rumi, Hafez, Saadi, Ferdowsi. Avicenna's philosophical works. Achaemenid inscriptions. Dehkhoda dictionary. Modern dissident literature.

Arabic & Islamic

Al-Maktaba al-Shamela

The largest online Arabic library — theology, jurisprudence, hadith, Qur'anic commentary, and the full scope of classical Arabic scholarship.

South Asia

Digital Library of India

Indian literature, philosophy, history, and sciences in multiple languages from India's national digital library project.

Africa

African Traditions

Timbuktu manuscripts, Ethiopian codices, Egyptian papyri, Ibn Khaldun, Négritude, and works by Achebe, Soyinka, Ngũgĩ, and Mahfouz. Oral traditions including the Sundiata and Mwindo epics.

Latin America

Latin American & Indigenous

The Popol Vuh and Chilam Balam. Liberation philosophy of Freire and Dussel. Borges, García Márquez, Neruda, Mistral, Sor Juana. Brazil's Domínio Público and the Cervantes Virtual Library.

Western Canon

Project Gutenberg & HathiTrust

The foundational public-domain corpus — thousands of works from antiquity through the early twentieth century — supplemented by HathiTrust's research-library holdings.

A reader built for scholars

Not a PDF viewer. A full reading environment with marginalia, notebooks, text-to-speech, and an AI research assistant — all running in your browser.

Marginalia & Highlights

Highlight in five colors with three styles — background, underline, squiggly. Attach freeform notes to any passage. Adjust highlight boundaries after creation. Export all annotations to Markdown.

Notebook

A side panel collects every excerpt and note across the book. Search, filter, and revisit your annotations. Copy passages to your notebook with a single tap.

Text-to-Speech

Three TTS engines with SSML-aware multilingual voice selection. Sentence highlighting follows along as you listen. Adjustable speed, sleep timer, and lock-screen controls.

Inline Translation

Select any passage to translate via Google, DeepL, or Azure. Wiktionary and Wikipedia lookups are one tap away. Bilingual reading mode for parallel-text study.

AI Research Assistant

Ask questions about the book you're reading. The assistant indexes each text into embeddings and answers with citations grounded in the source material.

Reading Modes

Paginated or scrolled. Single or dual column. Paragraph focus mode dims surrounding text. A reading ruler tracks your line. RTL, vertical, and CJK layout support. E-ink optimizations.

Start reading

Choose a faculty, browse their shelf, and open any book in the reader — with full annotation, TTS, and AI assistance.

Browse the Shelf