The author recounts how a college library job, shelving books from A to F, became a profound intellectual experience. By randomly sampling passages, they discovered captivating works like "The Education of Henry Adams." This serendipitous browsing, aided by the library's curated collection, offered a superior way to find good books compared to modern online searches.

Reflecting on the decline of traditional libraries and the rise of digital alternatives, the author laments the loss of browsable stacks and the potential discarding of old non-fiction books. Despite this, they argue that non-fiction remains a vibrant genre, even facing competition from AI and podcasts. To promote these often-overlooked quality books, they developed a free platform using AI tools like Claude Code and GPT-5.6 to search a curated list of non-fiction books that have won or been shortlisted for major awards.

The platform allows for unique searches, such as "classic biographies that are surprisingly weird," aiming to replicate the joy of unexpected discovery. It also provides data visualizations, including publisher rankings for non-fiction awards. The author highlights the enduring quality of the "long tail" of non-fiction, citing David Levering Lewis's biography of W.E.B. Du Bois as an example of a critically acclaimed but potentially hard-to-find gem. The project, funded by the author, is driven by a desire to help people discover and read more excellent non-fiction.