Sponsor Ciro Santilli's work on OurBigBook.com Taxation by 
Ciro Santilli 37 Updated 2025-05-13 +Created 1970-01-01
Ciro Santilli 37 Updated 2025-05-13 +Created 1970-01-01Ciro Santilli is a UK resident. He will register as a "solo trader" (slightly funny legal term) and treat donations that he uses for projects as grants, which pay regular income tax:
The rates are given at: www.gov.uk/income-tax-rates and are as of writing:
- 0 - £12,570 0%
- £12,571 - £50,270: 20%
- £50,271 - to £125,140: 40%
- £125,140: 45%
National insurance is also likely going to be paid: www.gov.uk/self-employed-national-insurance-rates:
Fortunately however VAT does not need to be paid.
The amount that will be declared is the same as he grant amount that was requested, e.g. if 100k USD is requested for 1 year, then 100k USD will be pro-rata declared on that year.
Any remaining donations that don't yet meet specific grant goals will be initially treated as cash gifts which pay no tax. If in the future they are used as grant money after further goal amounts are reached, then they will taxed as grants.
Note however that if the donor is UK-based and dies within 7 years of the gift being given, inheritance tax has to be paid on them as per: www.gov.uk/inheritance-tax/gifts, at a maximum of 32% and going to to 0% at 7 years, so let me know from the afterlife.
Pinned article: ourbigbook/introduction-to-the-ourbigbook-project
Welcome to the OurBigBook Project! Our goal is to create the perfect publishing platform for STEM subjects, and get university-level students to write the best free STEM tutorials ever.
Everyone is welcome to create an account and play with the site: ourbigbook.com/go/register. We belive that students themselves can write amazing tutorials, but teachers are welcome too. You can write about anything you want, it doesn't have to be STEM or even educational. Silly test content is very welcome and you won't be penalized in any way. Just keep it legal!
Intro to OurBigBook
. Source. We have two killer features:
- topics: topics group articles by different users with the same title, e.g. here is the topic for the "Fundamental Theorem of Calculus" ourbigbook.com/go/topic/fundamental-theorem-of-calculusArticles of different users are sorted by upvote within each article page. This feature is a bit like:
- a Wikipedia where each user can have their own version of each article
- a Q&A website like Stack Overflow, where multiple people can give their views on a given topic, and the best ones are sorted by upvote. Except you don't need to wait for someone to ask first, and any topic goes, no matter how narrow or broad
This feature makes it possible for readers to find better explanations of any topic created by other writers. And it allows writers to create an explanation in a place that readers might actually find it.
Figure 1. Screenshot of the "Derivative" topic page. View it live at: ourbigbook.com/go/topic/derivativeVideo 2. OurBigBook Web topics demo. Source. - local editing: you can store all your personal knowledge base content locally in a plaintext markup format that can be edited locally and published either:This way you can be sure that even if OurBigBook.com were to go down one day (which we have no plans to do as it is quite cheap to host!), your content will still be perfectly readable as a static site.
- to OurBigBook.com to get awesome multi-user features like topics and likes
- as HTML files to a static website, which you can host yourself for free on many external providers like GitHub Pages, and remain in full control
Figure 2. You can publish local OurBigBook lightweight markup files to either OurBigBook.com or as a static website.
Figure 3. Visual Studio Code extension installation.
Figure 5. . You can also edit articles on the Web editor without installing anything locally. Video 3. Edit locally and publish demo. Source. This shows editing OurBigBook Markup and publishing it using the Visual Studio Code extension. 
- Infinitely deep tables of contents:
All our software is open source and hosted at: github.com/ourbigbook/ourbigbook
Further documentation can be found at: docs.ourbigbook.com
Feel free to reach our to us for any help or suggestions: docs.ourbigbook.com/#contact