The direct line
The book, on your agent’s shelf.
Every Living Book ships with a hosted MCP endpoint of its own — one endpoint per book you own, answering from the press’s structured text.
MCP is the protocol your agents already speak — Claude Desktop, Cursor, any client that implements it. Point one at a book’s endpoint and the book becomes a tool: your agent can list its chapters, read them, search its passages, and ask it questions, with citations back to the lines.
The endpoint answers from the same structured files the press reader renders — the text the Seventy-One council graded, held on the press’s own shelf. Reading and searching run there entirely; only the conversation draws on the metered engine.
The key
Your Living Book key is the bearer token
When you buy the Living Book, the press mints you a key — it begins cs_live_ — scoped to that one book and carrying your ten million tokens of fuel. It arrives inside your MDX bundle, in consilience.json and in the frontmatter of index.mdx. Send it as the Authorization: Bearer header; the endpoint verifies it against the book and lets you in.
Bring your own key any time: edit the frontmatter in your bundle, and the conversation routes to your own provider while the endpoint keeps answering for the book.
Three lines of config
Claude Desktop, Cursor, whatever you run
The five tools
What your agent can ask for
One chapter, by number, as plain text with its title.
The whole book searched for a passage — up to ten matches, each cited to its chapter.
A question put to the book, answered against the text, metered against your token budget.
The table of contents, numbered, in reading order.
The book’s facts — author, kind, length, subjects, the council’s convergence score.
Begin here
Five questions to put to a book
What does the Odyssey say about hospitality?
Find every passage where the sea turns against the crew.
Read me chapter one, then tell me what it promises.
Where does the book speak of homecoming? Quote the lines.
List the chapters and give each one a single sentence.