Over the last seven weeks, Castalia House has translated approximately 10 million words from over 100 foreign language works into English. Most of these works have never before been translated into English, including the complete ouvres of major authors like Benito Perez Galdos, Eiji Yoshikawa, Zénaïde Fleuriot, Naoki Sanjugo, and Nomoro Kido. They also include never-before-seen military analyses of historic Japanese battles like Sekigahara, Nagashino, and the Korean Campaign published by the General Staff of the Imperial Japanese Army.
At some point in the next two weeks, Castalia House will launch Castalia Unlimited, which is designed to be a significant improvement on Kindle Unlimited. It is not a store. We will not offer single books for sale there and we are not attempting to compete with Amazon. What we will offer is a steady and relentless supply of high-quality literature from the public domain of every major literary language on Earth, including English, although the widespread availability from free sites like Project Gutenberg is why we will not focus on English originals. And due to the new Amazon KDP publishing limits, we anticipate a growing number of books that are exclusively available at CU.
You can now sign up and register for an account at Castalia Unlimited. All you need to do is provide a username, and email address, and a password, and we’ll send you back an email to confirm your email address. When the site goes live, you’ll be the first to be notified, and if you’re a paid subscriber to this substack, your account will already be loaded with the appropriate amount of download credits. And be sure to check your spam and your junk folders if the confirmation email hasn’t arrived within five minutes or so.
All Castalia House ebooks are DRM-free, as they have always been. Every download from Castalia Unlimited becomes your property, unlike that other nominally unlimited site where your access to that five-million-book catalog of My Dead Billionaire Boyfriend, Gay Vampire Raptors in Space, and My D&D Elf Harem is capped at 20 at a time and ends the moment you stop paying $12 per month in tribute for your ability to access those books. And all registered users, not just subscribers, will be given free access to the cleaned-up foreign language text files we have produced in preparing for the translations; these files will have a separate download limit that don’t count against a subscriber’s monthly ebook download limit.
We anticipate having between 150 and 300 books in five languages available on launch, with an average of 10 new books being added every week. Our production schedule anticipates having 1,500 books available by the end of 2027. There will be three levels of subscription, two of which will be available monthly, the third will only be available as an annual subscription. The Basic subscription is similar to this paid substack subscription, $9.99 per month or $99 per year for six books a month; those taking out annual Basic subscriptions will be able to download an additional book per month. The Premium and Infinite subscriptions will be defined at launch. And, of course, all paid subscriptions to this substack will be grandfathered into the Castalia Unlimited system at the appropriate level.
If you have any questions or suggestions, feel free to leave them in the comments.
Castalia Library makes the world’s most beautiful leather books at its own bindery in Switzerland. Castalia House is the world’s premier translator of never-before translated works from Japanese, Spanish, French, Italian, and German into English. To support Castalia House’s historic translation efforts and receive a new translated ebook every week, support the Alexandria project, and get future access to Castalia Unlimited, become a paid subscriber to this substack. And to receive a premium deluxe leatherbound history book every four months, subscribe to Castalia History.