imperium sine fine // curated by @davemagne // building @getlexapp
Joined August 2023
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Empire-Builders retweeted
I hosted an author lunch in NYC this week.
Here's what we discussed and who joined:
1) More authors are moving to Substack
Every author should have a newsletter. You want to have a direct line of communication with your audience/readers. Substack doesn't have fancy features or automations but it is free, which is extremely attractive. It's also the only email platform that doubles as a social media platform. When you publish on Substack, there's a chance your newsletter can go viral and you'll gain a ton of new subs from it.
2) Tell your readers what to do next
If you're writing a non-fiction book, don't just tell readers what the problem is and why the problem exists. Offer possible solutions, strategies, and next steps. Readers pick up prescriptive non-fiction books because they're looking for advice and guidance. Aim to transform your readers, not just inform them.
3) An author's "job" is to live and learn
The best part about being an author is that your job is basically to live life and learn things. If you go on an amazing trip, you can write about it in your book. If something horrible happens to you, you can use it as a story in your book. If you want to study a topic, you can dive deep into it and then summarize insights from the experience in your book. Living life and learning new things is essentially all a way to do research and find stories for future books.
Here are the authors who joined:
- Gloria Mark ("Attention Span")
- Steve Kamb ("How To Try Again")
- David Mainayar (Lex Audio founder)
- Sam Vander Wielen ("When I Start My Business, I’ll Be Happy")
Empire-Builders retweeted
My favorite book on my favorite Normans is Norwich's "Normans in the South".
The best scholarly overview is Roach's "Empire of the Normans".
Honorable mention goes to Brownworth's "The Normans".
The best youtube documentary on the Normans is my collab with @EmpiresPod link 👇
Empire-Builders retweeted
People will look you dead in the eyes and tell you there’s nothing mysterious and otherworldly about the orient
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Empire-Builders retweeted
Today in the year 936 in Aachen Cathedral, Otto the Great was coronated as King of Germany
Empire-Builders retweeted
The name "America," from Amerigo, comes ultimately from Proto-Germanic *Amalarīks. So, the Old English word for America could be *Amelrīċ.
Ironically, an early OE speaker would probably reinterpret a country name of 'Amelrīċ' as 'Amelarīċ,' which would mean 'home of the brave.'
Empire-Builders retweeted
His feet are light and nimble. He never sleeps. He says that he will never die. He dances in light and in shadow and he is a great favorite. He never sleeps, the judge. He is dancing, dancing. He says that he will never die.
Empire-Builders retweeted
It's completely unnecessary to destroy books when machines like this exist.
This book scanner by Treventus for example, can scan fragile books without destroying it.
🦔AI companies are bulk-buying rare books, scanning them through high-speed machines that cut the spines off, and shredding the originals. A service called ISBNdb facilitates orders of up to a million books and keeps buyers anonymous. Pre-2022 books are premium because they're free of AI-generated text. A federal judge ruled the practice is fair use because eliminating the original means only one copy exists at a time. Anthropic hired the former head of Google Books partnerships to obtain "all the books in the world."
My Take
This got to me. A bookseller told 404 Media that rare books with almost no surviving copies are being fed into this pipeline. Books that survived wars, fires, and centuries of handling are being shredded so an AI can learn to write a better marketing email.
ISBNdb's website literally says "'AI company destroys two million books' is not a headline that generates sympathy," and they still built an entire business around making it happen quietly. They offer NDAs as a feature. They coach clients to call it "digital preservation."
I've covered AI companies scraping the internet, torrenting libraries, and stealing music. This is worse because it's irreversible. You can re-upload a website. You can reprint a bestseller. You can't replace the last three copies of an 18th-century botanical text once someone shreds them for training data. And the judge said it's legal. So it's going to accelerate.
"We shred rare books and offer NDAs so nobody finds out" is a legitimate business model in 2026. What a timeline.
Hedgie🤗
You're Napoleon.
Your posts treat great-man biographies as the ultimate self-help, rank his life S-tier, stream marathon classics like the Odyssey, build reading empires, and live the "imperium sine fine" motto. Ambitious, voracious reader, empire-obsessed, forever recruiting the next generation of builders.
