About Stefan Motz
Globusz Books did not begin as a business plan. It grew out of a lifelong love of reading, a student who once had to wait for scarce library books, an immigrant with time on his hands, a cheap laptop, a painfully slow AOL connection, and a curiosity about how the new thing called the internet worked.
Decades later, I am returning to the same basic idea: books should be easier to discover, understand, and enjoy.
At college in Debrecen, my classmates and I sometimes had to wait for one another to finish a library book needed for our courses because there were not enough copies. I loved reading and dreamed that one day I would have a house with an entire room as a library.
After moving to America I bought my first laptop mainly to play computer games. Then I discovered AOL, painfully slow web pages, search engines, online chat — and HTML. I could not afford Dreamweaver, so I learned with tutorials and Notepad, writing the code myself. My first website was for a hairdresser.
Project Gutenberg changed my idea of what a library could be. I began turning plain public-domain text files into HTML ebooks with linked tables of contents and JavaScript footnotes. I no longer needed a huge room full of shelves; I could carry a library on a laptop. I bought globusz.com and started sharing it.
Globusz grew far beyond my hobby. Its pages appeared near the top of book-title searches, Wikipedia linked to some of the ebooks, and living authors began sending manuscripts. Suzanne Fleming, an Australian university teacher and author, became a close collaborator. Volunteers in several countries helped create multilingual editions, and writers from around the world joined the project.
After more than ten years of work, a copyright dispute involving the grandson of a Romanian poet turned ugly. His demand for $250,000 shocked me. I lost my temper in an email and used language I am still embarrassed by. When he forwarded it to authors and university contacts, embarrassment got the better of me. I took Globusz offline and gave the ebook collection to another publisher. I regretted quitting for years.
Globusz had already taught me skills I never expected to use professionally. At Continental Airlines in Newark, a colleague recommended me when the airport needed an internal website. That led from web pages to Access, then SQL Server, databases, and eventually an IT Developer position in Houston. What began as a hobby quietly became a career.
After COVID I retired and returned to building small websites for friends and former colleagues, still mostly for pleasure. I also had more time to read and listen through Audible. The old Globusz idea never really left me. Modern tools finally made it possible to bring it back in a different form: not as an ebook repository, but as a large book-discovery and summary library.
Why self-development?
I have been interested in self-development for most of my life. Part of the reason is very simple: I knew I had a temper, and I wanted to change. Life also supplied plenty of material to work with — growing up under communism, difficult encounters with the Securitate, an attempted border crossing, moving countries, changing careers, family life, setbacks, and starting over more than once.
Over the years I explored meditation, the Silva Method, visualization, breathing, Reiki, psychology, gratitude, and other approaches. I do not believe in gurus. I try things, keep what works, and discard the nonsense.
That is why the self-development section remains part of StefanMotz.com even as Globusz Books becomes the main identity. It is not a separate persona. It is part of the same curiosity that made me read so much in the first place.
Explore Self-DevelopmentThe life behind the site
I grew up in Transylvania, spent my teenage years in Oradea (Nagyvárad), played water polo, boxed, lived through communist Romania, later moved to Hungary and worked as an elementary school teacher, then came to the United States and eventually became an IT developer for a major airline.
I do not feel that I ever really “worked” in the usual sense. Whether I was teaching, building websites, learning databases, or creating Globusz, I tended to turn whatever I was doing into a hobby I was being paid for. That attitude probably explains both some of the best decisions of my life and a few of the more ridiculous ones.
Those experiences also gave me a great deal of material for thinking about change, resilience, attention, anger, relationships, and starting over. I eventually turned those lessons into START THERE, my first self-development book.
Read START THERE OnlineHow I review
I use each summary to answer a practical question: is this book likely to deserve a reader’s time? I look at the central ideas, the kind of reader the book may suit, what it does well, where it becomes less convincing, and whether its lessons can survive ordinary life.
I do not treat a summary as a replacement for the original book. It is a decision tool. When a book looks useful, I want the review to make the next choice easier: read it, listen to it, save it for later, or move on without guilt.
My approach comes from years of reading, building online book collections, writing personal articles, and testing self-development ideas in my own life. START THERE brings that practical philosophy together in my own book.
What I hope Globusz becomes
I want Globusz Books to help people discover books they might otherwise miss, understand what a book is trying to say before committing their time, and then — when a book deserves it — go read or listen to the original.
The site will also keep a smaller personal corner for my articles, experiments, memories, and self-development books. I plan to keep writing about what life has taught me, without pretending I have finished learning. That mixture is intentional. Reading has always been connected to the way I try to understand life.