The manifesto
Written in the spring of 2026, and open to signature ever since.
“Machines write billions of words a day. All the more reason to read the ones a human being spent years finding.”
That sentence is not a slogan. It is the reason this company exists, and the one we go back to whenever a decision is hard.
In the age of AI, reading is not one more pastime — it is a quiet act of resistance. Not against machines, which we use ourselves and gladly. Against the idea that attention is a resource to be extracted; that a book is content; that a library is a dashboard.
So we use artificial intelligence for exactly one thing: bringing you back to books. It reads your shelves so that you never have to type three hundred titles. Then it steps aside.
Here is what that commits us to. Six articles — shorter than our terms of service, and held to more closely.
The six articles
Paper, and nothing else.
We will only ever catalogue a copy: the one with a tired spine, an inscription on the flyleaf and a precise place in a room. A file has none of that.
No link to a digital edition. Ever.
No e-reader button, no dematerialised format, at any point. This is not a missing feature — it is a door we keep shut.
We sell nothing. We tell you where to go.
When we know where a book is, we will give you an address and opening hours — never a basket. The difference is a few hundred metres wide, and it changes everything.
Independent booksellers first.
When a link leads somewhere, it leads to a bookseller: Place des Libraires, leslibraires.fr, the shop window on the corner. Never a warehouse.
We count copies, not minutes.
Editions, publishers discovered, series completed, bookshops walked into — those are the numbers that interest us. Reading is not a performance, and a library is not a dashboard.
Nothing here is in a hurry.
A paper book does not update itself, does not leave a catalogue overnight and does not vanish because a licence expired. We are building for that timescale.
That is the contract. It is shorter than our terms of service, and we hold to it more closely.
The Tomeling team — and everyone who has signed below.
Co-sign the letter
Readers, authors, publishers, booksellers, teachers: add your name. An email so we can tell you when the letter is published, a name or a pseudonym — your choice, both count the same — and what you do with books.