Personal Library Index

Index of copyrighted books the founder owns as digital files, stored OUTSIDE the git-tracked vault to avoid committing copyrighted binaries. Each entry points to the local-only file path. Vault assessment notes for these books live in 06-reference/ and use source_fidelity: primary-source since the underlying text was read directly.

Why this index exists

The vault ~/rdco-vault/ is a git-tracked repo. Copyrighted books should never land in the working tree (clone leakage, backup risk, distribution risk).
Founder still wants Ray to read primary sources when available, so a separate, local-only library is required.
This index gives Ray a way to know what owned books exist without inspecting the filesystem on every read.

Storage convention

Path: ~/Documents/library/books/
Filename: <author-lastname>-<year>-<title-slug>.<ext>
Format: PDF preferred. EPUB acceptable. No DRMed formats.
Provenance: every file should have founder-owned receipt or in-product purchase trail. Library Genesis / Z-Library / scraped PDFs are NOT acceptable for this directory.

Owned books

Author	Year	Title	Format	Local path	Vault assessment note
Beck, Kent	2002	Test-Driven Development: By Example	PDF	`~/Documents/library/books/beck-2002-test-driven-development-by-example.pdf`	../06-reference/2026-05-05-beck-tdd-by-example

How Ray uses this index

When the founder asks Ray to read or assess a book:

Check this index first. If owned, read the local PDF directly and use source_fidelity: primary-source in the assessment note frontmatter.
If not owned, build the assessment from public sources (Wikipedia, author talks, blog posts, secondary summaries) and use source_fidelity: reconstructed-from-web in the frontmatter.
Per copyright discipline (CLAUDE.md mandatory_copyright_requirements + the no-derivative-summaries rule): no >15-word direct quotes, no chapter-by-chapter reproduction, no displacive long-form summaries. The assessment note should be SHORTER and DENSER than the source, not a substitute for it.
When upgrading a note from reconstructed-from-web to primary-source, preserve the public-source citations (they show due diligence) but rewrite the body to reflect direct primary-source reading.

Connection to the bookstore-for-agents concept

This index is a 1-person prototype of the bookstore-for-agents wedge - the founder owns a PDF, Ray ingests it, and the vault gets a primary-source assessment. At scale, this is exactly what an agent-native bookstore primitive looks like (founder-owned credentials → publisher API → agent reads → vault note). See ../01-projects/bookstore-for-agents/2026-05-05-concept-seed.

Maintenance

Add a row when a new book lands in ~/Documents/library/books/.
Remove a row only if the file is deleted (and update the vault assessment note’s source_fidelity if downgrading).
Don’t add scrape-only or pirated content; this index is for owned-license content only.