※ A reading room for difficult books
Read the hard books.
Be-ing glosses every technical term right where you read it — so the philosophy that used to read like another language finally reads like a book.
III.By , I mean that which is in itself, and is : in other words, that of which a conception can be formed independently of any other conception.
IV.By , I mean that which the intellect perceives as constituting the essence of substance.
V.By , I mean the modifications of substance, or that which exists in, and is conceived through, something other than itself.
Tap a marked term — the gloss follows you through the whole book.
¶ How it works
Choose a book
Pick anything from the public-domain library — Spinoza, Kant, Nietzsche, the Stoics — or upload a book you own.
We gloss it
Every technical term gets a definition written for its context: what the word means here, in this argument, on this page.
Read without leaving the page
Definitions sit in the margin, one tap away. No dictionary, no second tab, no losing your place mid-sentence.
§ The open library
The canon, free to read.
† Your books
Bring the book you’ve been avoiding.
Upload a book you own in a common format — EPUB, PDF, or plain text. Be-ing reads it, finds the terms that would send you to a dictionary, and writes a gloss for each one in the context of that book. Then it’s on your shelf, ready to read.
Built for philosophy — but it works on any book that’s harder than it should be.
See how glossing worksGlossing · Being and Time
- chapters read83 / 83
- terms found412
- glosses written389…
“Dasein” — the kind of being that asks what being is. Heidegger means you.
‡ Plans
Reader
Free, forever
The full public-domain library, completely glossed. Highlights, notes, and nothing to pay.
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Everything in Reader, plus your own books — upload them and read with the full gloss treatment.
See pricing“All things excellent are as difficult as they are rare.”
Spinoza — Ethics, Part V