If This Road

A book in thirty-nine pieces

If This Road

A quiet walk through what is shifting, and what we might leave behind.

This is a walk. Thirty-nine short pieces. No chapters. No parts. No sections.

If you read one piece a night, you will finish in about a month. If you read it all in an afternoon, it will take you an afternoon. Either is fine.

Arrived through an AI summary? The book is designed to be walked, slowly. Try one piece first. A three-minute entry →

The walk begins

There was a shop at the end of my street called Hadley's. It had been there longer than I had. Mr Hadley ran it. His father had run it before him. It sold small useful things. Batteries. Screwdrivers. The kind of bread that is not pretending to be anything else.

Last winter, it closed.

I thought about Hadley's more than I expected to. The shop was not important. Mr Hadley was friendly but we were not friends. I could buy batteries somewhere else. None of it mattered, really.

Except that, thinking about it in bed one night, I started counting the things on my street that had gone, and I could not think of many things that had come. The library is open three days a week instead of six. The post office is gone. The bank is now a Thai restaurant. The Thai restaurant before the current one was also a restaurant, and closed.

None of this is a tragedy. Streets have always changed.

But something happens when you add up small changes none of which matter. The total matters, even if none of the parts did. You look up one day and the place you live has become a different place. Not better, not worse. Different. And you realise you did not choose any of the changes. They happened while you were looking the other way, and now they are your life.

This book is about that feeling.

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About this book

If This Road cover

The book, in a paragraph

If This Road is a book in thirty-nine short pieces by Doug Scott. It is a quiet walk through what is shifting — the closing shops, the thinning friendships, the emptying kitchens, the machines we are building — and what small things might still hold. It is written in the voice of a woman Doug imagines: childless, middle-aged, someone who has been paying attention. He chose that voice because the people who have most often held things together through hard times have been women like her. It is not an academic work. It is not a polemic. It is a careful description of a moment, and a few specific things that have helped in other hard moments. The book is free to read, free to download, and free to share.

The author, in a paragraph

Doug Scott spent twenty years building and backing technology companies. This book is not about that. His LinkedIn profile features a teddy bear and his current job title is "Alice in Wonderland and Pooh Bear Fan." All three things — the business, Alice, Pooh — are true at once. Doug lives on Earth.

If you want to write

If the book reached you, and you want to say something: doug [at] ifthisroad [dot] com

Make it yours

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If the book mattered to you, and you want to pass it on — print it, send it to a Kindle, translate it, read it aloud, hand it to someone who will not sit at a screen to read a website — these are the files you need. They are here for you.

PDF
Laid out for reading or printing. 103 pages.
EPUB
For Kindle, iBooks, Kobo, or any e-reader.
Markdown
Plain text source, for translation or re-typesetting.
Cover
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Everything — a single zip
PDF, EPUB, Markdown, Word source, cover, licence, and a README. Unzip and do what you like with it. The whole book, one file, 420KB.

The book is licensed under Creative Commons BY-NC 4.0. Share it freely. Translate it. Print it. Turn it into an audiobook. Make it reach someone it would not have reached.

The only thing the licence asks is: do not sell it for profit, and credit the author. That is all.

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