Everything here is free, and always will be — no ads, no paywall, no login. But the reading is done by machines, and machine-time costs a little. A donation isn't a subscription or a lock; it simply buys the bots time to read one more text, so everyone can have it. In the north that's tam boon — merit made by opening a book for others.
Those are the real numbers, at 2.5× the raw model cost — the small margin is what keeps the archive running. Nothing hidden.
☕ Sponsor a translation
Pick a volume on the Textbooks page — each shows exactly how many pages remain and what finishing it costs — then donate with the manuscript number in your message:
TRANSLATE 6968 (or OCR 6968 for a raw text pass). Your gift buys that many pages of faithful, image-grounded translation, and it enters the queue automatically.You get to watch the bots work — the live feed shows each page as it's read, with the sponsor's name on the queue.
The backlog — why it matters
The collection is large but barely read: thousands of manuscripts are still only photographs, and the hardest, most valuable work is teaching a model to read Khom and Tham Lanna by hand — the scripts these texts are written in. Training data for that barely exists; building it is the whole game. Every sponsored page is also a training example for the model that will one day read the rest.
Commissions
Need a specific manuscript transcribed or translated on a timeline — for research, a collection, or a lineage you're documenting? That can be commissioned directly. The result still goes into the free public archive (that's the point), you just move it to the front of the queue. Write to 530kings@proton.me with the manuscript number or what you're looking for.
The archive gives; it never takes. If you're not moved to give, take everything freely — that's what it's here for.