Charles Darwin was an English naturalist, geologist, and biologist who wrote several scientific works, including the controversial On the Origin of Species. It’s not an easy read. His writing is dense, wordy, and relies on passive voice. Just reading it was pretty tough the first time, on account of my cyclical attention pattern.

Editing it for greater accessibility is part of how I read difficult works, mainly because I can’t get very far through them unless I break up sentences and paragraphs.

This is the first edition, an HTML book. It functions as a website because it is one. It’s stored locally and works offline.

These are in dark mode by default. I called my brand “dark mode press” because that’s the only way I can read and code them. But I know not everyone likes that, so there is a light mode toggle button at the top of every page.

I hate long, long web pages that make you have to scroll all the way back up to the menu. Darwin’s chapters are long enough to warrant “back to top” links and back/next navigation at the end.

Darwin makes several references to this graph, a lithograph by William West. Some brilliant person under the moniker “Inductiveload” made a vectorized version with a readable typeface, bigger letters, and bolder lines. So we can actually see it.

Because Darwin’s sentences are so long and sometimes convoluted, there are instances when I just turned whole paragraph-sentences into bullet lists. Such as in the following example.

There’s a second edition with a few updates, which I will cover in another post. And someday, if I ever find time, I dream of doing a third edition wherein I’ll remove filler words and phrases. Until then, I have a ridiculously long list of other books to get through first.