Shel Kaphan by Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16
First Amazon hire, wrote and led the team that wrote v1.
He looks like an older and more experienced dude compared to Bezos at the time.
Bibliography:
. www.geekwire.com/2011/meet-shel-kaphan-amazoncom-employee-1/2/ also mentions that unlike California, there's no sales tax in the state of Washington, which is important for selling books.
Video 1.
Shel Kaphan interview by Internet History Podcast (2015)
Source.
Video 2.
Amazon.com Continues to Grow by NBC 15 (2014)
Source. Features short excerpt of filmed interview with Shel.
Figure 1. . Source. TODO year. Presumably more or less close to publishing date of source at 2020.
Arghh, why so hard... tested 2021:
This is perhaps the most popular version of Great doubt in 21st century China
Fuller quote as seen e.g. at: www.hrfjw.com/fjrw/hcrw/ywfs/324750.html
大疑大悟,小疑小悟,不疑不悟
translation;
Great doubt, great underestanding. Small doubt, small understanding. No doubt, no understanding.
k.sina.cn/article_5668613235_151e02c7300100wutq.html attributes it to modern day Chinese "Master Chongci" (崇慈法师).
Google X by Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16
Wikipedia reads:
Any contributor could create and own new Knol articles, and there could be multiple articles on the same topic with each written by a different author.
so basically exactly what Ciro Santilli wants to do on OurBigBook.com. Ominous.
Like any closed source "failure", everything was deleted. wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/Knol
Google Books by Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16
They scanned a bunch of books, and then allowed search results to hit them. They then only show a small context around the hit to avoid copyright infringement.
Bibliography:
Google Scholar by Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16
Does this contain any structured data? E.g. can you list all papers by a given author besides just searching and hoping there are no homonyms?
Knol by Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16
Very similar to OurBigBook.com!
People who worked on it:
Video 1.
How to use Google Knol by Hack Learning (2011)
Source. One of the last users of the website for sure! The owner of that YouTube channel is a Mark Barnes:
Video 2. Source.
Replying to a listener phone-in question WNYC radio, mediated by Brian Lehrer.
It was about to launch it seems, and it was not clear at the time that anyone could write content, as opposed to only selected people.
Jimmy then corrects that misinformation. He then clearly states that since there can be multiple versions of each article, including opinion pieces, like OurBigBook.com, Knol would be very different to Wikipedia, more like blogging than encyclopedia.
Video 3.
Google Knol: the future of academic journals? by Doug Belshaw (2010)
Source.
Bibliography:

Pinned article: 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!
We have two killer features:
  1. 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-calculus
    Articles 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/derivative
  2. 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.
    Figure 2.
    You can publish local OurBigBook lightweight markup files to either https://OurBigBook.com or as a static website
    .
    Figure 3.
    Visual Studio Code extension installation
    .
    Figure 4.
    Visual Studio Code extension tree navigation
    .
    Figure 5.
    Web editor
    . 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.
    Video 4.
    OurBigBook Visual Studio Code extension editing and navigation demo
    . Source.
  3. https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ourbigbook/ourbigbook-media/master/feature/x/hilbert-space-arrow.png
  4. Infinitely deep tables of contents:
    Figure 6.
    Dynamic article tree with infinitely deep table of contents
    .
    Descendant pages can also show up as toplevel e.g.: ourbigbook.com/cirosantilli/chordate-subclade
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