About

You write on today's page. At midnight it seals: it is still there to read, and it cannot be rewritten. There is no date picker, no way to fill in last Tuesday, and no way to go back and improve a day after it happened.

That is the whole idea, and it is the one thing we will not soften. A diary you can edit afterwards records the story you would rather have had. This one records the day you actually had.

A page is not a text box. You write in your own hand, tape photographs onto it, stick things on, move them around and put them where you want. Your Book has a cover you chose. Nothing here is a form to fill in.

A new Book starts public, which means the days in it can be read by anyone at all — no account needed — and can be found through a search engine. On the Settings page you can narrow that to your followers only, or to nobody but yourself, and the change takes effect straight away, including for days you had already written.

The Privacy page says exactly what each of the three choices does.

You can follow a person and read the Books they left open. On a day you can leave a margin note, or press a seal on it. That is all the social there is: somebody read your Tuesday and left a note.

There is no ranking, no reshares, no follower counts on display and nothing that rewards writing for an audience.

You can destroy a page you wrote. The writing, the pictures, the notes on it and the seals are all deleted, at once and for good. There is no bin, no undo and no recovery window, and nobody at OpenBook can get it back for you.

• No advertising, and none is planned.
• No analytics and no tracking of any kind today. If that ever changes, the Privacy page will say so before it starts, and it will never record what you write.
• Nobody at OpenBook reads your Book.
• Nothing you write is used to train anything.
• Your data is never sold.

Nothing. OpenBook is free. Decoration for your pages will one day be bought with Ink, the currency inside the app; nothing can be bought yet and nobody is charged anything today. The Terms page says what happens when that changes.

OpenBook is made by one person, Sajal Jahan, and it is still being built. Write to hello@openbook.cool — a person reads it, and you will get a real answer. Who runs the site and where it is hosted is on the Imprint page.