About Athenaeum Populi

Athenaeum Populi is a free, nonprofit, open-source library of textbooks with interactive learning objects. It exists to make high-quality learning material freely usable by anyone, anywhere, in as many languages as possible.

Principles

Free forever. No ads, no paywalls, no accounts. The project is nonprofit and intends to stay that way.

Open content. Every book is built from openly licensed sources — Creative Commons, OpenStax, and similar. Books are stored as plain Markdown, version controlled in the open, and downloadable. When a book is revised, older versions are preserved.

Interactive by default. Reading is not the same as understanding. Books include check-yourself questions, in-page exercises, and live math so you can practice as you read — all graded locally in your browser.

Accessible to everyone. Accessibility is a first-class requirement, not an afterthought. The site targets WCAG conformance: full keyboard navigation, visible focus, sufficient contrast, and respect for reduced-motion preferences.

Anonymous. There are no logins, no profiles, and no tracking of your work.

How content is curated

Books are curated by Derek together with invited domain experts and textbook authors. New and revised material is reviewed through pull requests on GitHub; reviewers are credited on each book. This keeps quality high while keeping the whole process open.

Open source

The entire site — code, components, and every book — lives in a public repository: github.com/derekjones1/athenaeum-populi. You can read the source, download any book as Markdown, report problems, or propose improvements through issues and pull requests. The site code is MIT licensed; each book carries its own open license, noted on its cover page.

Where it is headed

The library begins with mathematics — a ladder starting at prealgebra and building up through algebra, precalculus, and calculus — then expands across the sciences and beyond. The long-term aim is a broad, multilingual collection of the best openly licensed textbooks, all in one place.

This site is in early development. The structure and interactive components are in place; the books are being added next.