Your Highlights Deserve a Better Home

I personally read a lot. Not because I am chasing some numbers, but because good books leave me with a handful of sentences and ideas I like to keep. A line that makes me pause for a second. A paragraph I want to tell about to my son. An idea I want to come back to in a year.

For a long time, those sentences had nowhere to go, properly.

The Problem

You are reading a book and you highlight a passage. It glows yellow for a moment and you maybe even feel smart. Then you close the book, and that sentence vanishes into a list you will never open again.

A week later, you can't even remember which book it was in. A month later, you can't remember the sentence. A year later, you can't remember why the book felt important to you.

This is the quiet tragedy of digital reading (or maybe of reading at all, when you do not make notes). The highlight tool makes us feel like we're capturing ideas, but we are not. We're just marking data we will never revisit.

We built justRead.app because we wanted to read on our phones without losing what we read. And in version 2.6, we think we finally got the most important piece right.

The Solution

justRead.app now connects to a service called Readwise.

If you've never heard of it, here is the short version: Readwise is a website service that collects every sentence you've ever underlined in a book and sends a small handful of them back to you each day via email. Five or ten quotes, nothing more.

You open the email or the app, you reread the lines, and something amazing happens. The ideas come back. The book you finished three years ago starts talking to you again. The sentences you almost forgot become part of how you think.

It is the closest thing we have ever found to actually remembering what we read (except taking notes by ourselves).

How It Works

You read a book in justRead.app. You drag your finger across a sentence, you tap to highlight it.

Then, whenever you want, you tap sync to transfer those highlights into Readwise and a few seconds later, they are there. That is the whole flow.

You don't have to copy anything anywhere. You don't have to export files. You just tap to sync.

The previous versions have a feature that exports highlights into PDF and Markdown (still there), but users asked for Readwise. They asked inside the app, on the roadmap page we built specifically so we could hear from the people actually using justRead.app, instead of guessing what users want. Users voted and we built it. That is how this version got shaped.

If you open justRead today, that roadmap is still there. The next version will be shaped by what you put on it.

The End Result

A book you finished last month is no longer behind you. It is in front of you, in small daily doses, for as long as you want to keep thinking about it.

The highlights you made on a Sunday afternoon are not buried in a menu. They are working for you, coming back when you need them, not when you remember to look for them.

That, to us, is what reading on a phone should feel like.

Here is a short video showing the whole thing in action: