Build
Build a book-powered tool.
The catalog is open to tools built by others. If a book belongs in an AI workflow — one you wrote, one you teach from, one already under an open license — you can build the MCP server or skill yourself. The whole build spec is a single file you hand to your coding agent.
What you'd build
A book-powered tool makes a book's methods callable inside an AI workflow — frameworks, checklists, workflows, diagnostic questions, principles, warnings — each one cited back to the source. It is not a chapter dump.
Take Producing Open Source Software. A weak version exposes get_chapter("communications") and returns 4,000 words; that just relocates the book. The good version extracts the project-health method as a framework and exposes an audit_project tool that scores a repo across ten areas and names the single highest-leverage fix, each with a citation. Tool names map to the work; the data holds the method, never the full text.
The agent decides the book's shape first — prescriptive, descriptive, dialectical, or procedural — so a book that only describes patterns doesn't get flattened into a fake checklist of rules.
You publish only what you have the right to publish. Open-license and public-domain books can become public tools with attribution preserved; copyrighted books stay local or private unless the author or publisher has granted permission. The context-engineering case explains why a callable, cited tool beats a paste or a paraphrase.
How to build one
The build spec is a single file designed to be copied into a coding agent — Claude Code, Cursor, Pi, or similar — together with a book URL or file. The agent ingests the source, decides the extraction discipline, extracts the method layer into a typed data contract, generates an MCP server and/or an agent skill, and runs a smoke test before reporting back.
It is a public build spec, not Book Power's source code. It exists so others can create compatible artifacts, publish them, and submit them to this catalog.
Submit to the catalog
Built something useful? Send it over. Public tools from open-license books can join the catalog alongside Think Like a Commoner, Governable Spaces, Plurality, and Producing Open Source Software. If your artifact ships a book-power.json manifest at its root, it's faster to process — but a link and a few lines are enough to start.