One Tool to Read Them All

Reading some of the feedback on my recent article about reading more books made me realise how much the tools we use influence the way we read. One observation in the article was about replacing the time spent on your phone with a book and making your phone look boring to help you do that. It’s easy to pick up a phone and scroll, so it should be easy to use it to read more. So why don’t people use it to read books? Because a phone is a pocket computer designed to distract users, a book is a boring technology designed to focus their attention.

I’m satisfied with the tools I have for reading books. Unfortunately, I can’t say the same for reading online. After all these years, I still haven’t found a single tool that brings together content discovery, following, reading, and exploring a website’s archive.

My wish for a perfect online reading experience starts with discovering content. I want to find interesting material to read, and since time is always limited, I want it to be filtered according to my interests and ranked in a transparent way that I can directly influence. Then, when I find a good article, I want a good interface to consume it. Since the reading experience varies from one website to another, I want a clean interface designed to keep me focused. I also want to be able to highlight passages and take notes, to help me remember and make reading more rewarding. I’d like a way to keep track of the blogs I follow and get notified when they publish new content. Lastly, I want a tool that treats older content as relevant as newer content. A tool that doesn’t force me to prioritise the latest article.

This last point is really important to me, since I haven’t found anything yet that tries to solve this problem. Relevant content can be found in the entire archive of a blog, not just in the latest posts. Just as I reach for old books considered classics because they have stood the test of time, I often find articles published years ago still relevant. But to…