explaining our solution is difficult even to this day. The challenge is that there aren’t other mainstream tools we can reference as an analogy.

Readwise is software that helps you get a higher return on time invested in reading by helping you gather all your annotations into one place, and then making it easy to consistently review those notes and highlights.

few of us have a system for consistently returning to those notes and highlights.

the chief complaints we receive these days are questions like: Why can’t I easily return to the context surrounding a specific highlight?

You might think you could just cargo cult the concept of a block to a modern reading tool, but reading and writing are just too different. We needed something new.

Software has clearly “eaten” the practice of writing. Yet the practice of reading is still mostly analog.

If you want to fill a leaky bucket, you first need to stop the leak. If you want to get more out of reading, you first need to forget less.

spaced repetition can also be leveraged to enhance creativity by repeatedly resurfacing a hard problem you’re working on — from different angles and in different contexts. I’ve even begun to write essays using spaced repetition

To avoid bloat, we always try to keep some “anti-goals” front and center (borrowed from Joel Spolsky).

We are not building another note-taking app.

our passion from the start has been reading, and our frustration continues to be the lack of software innovation in this phase of the knowledge acquisition loop.

We are not attempting to make reading social or enable an internet-scale annotation layer.

You couldn’t invent Figma before Sketch and Illustrator nailed the single-player vector-based experience.

We are NOT trying to apply the wisdom of the crowds, artificial intelligence, or mechanical turks to replace everything you read with derivatives.