Start Here: What This Is Really About
Reading is one of the most intellectually demanding things people do regularly, and almost no software treats it that way.
Most reading apps are built for one imaginary reader—usually someone who reads consistently, finishes everything, and wants social validation. The actual spectrum of reader types gets ignored entirely.
Think about what gets tracked in a typical quantified life: sleep cycles, workout intensity, daily steps, screen time, work output, meditation minutes. We build dashboards for nearly every activity that shapes our days. But reading - which often consumes five to ten hours a week for people who take it seriously - gets a list of finished books, a yearly count, and a vague sense of having read more or less than last year.
That gap isn’t accidental. It reflects a deeper misunderstanding of what reading is and why it matters, and I’m writing to try to correct it.
Why reading deserves serious tools
Reading is not passive consumption - it’s sustained cognitive labor that most of us drastically undervalue. It requires attention without constant feedback loops, tolerance for ambiguity, and the ability to hold memory, interpretation, and emotional openness across long spans of time.
Anyone who has returned to serious reading after a long absence recognizes the sensation immediately: the mind feels slower and deeper, less reactive, more capable of holding complexity. People come away from books changed in ways that are difficult to measure but easy to recognize. And yet most reading software treats books as inventory and readers as completion machines. Storage works, progress bars move, finished lists grow. What gets lost is the reading life itself - the texture and rhythm of how books actually move through consciousness over time.
Your reading life already has structure (you just can’t see it)
Most people believe their reading habits are inconsistent or chaotic, but in practice, reading lives are highly patterned. People read at certain times of day. They read differently on workdays versus weekends. They linger over some books and abandon others within pages. They return to the same authors, genres, and preoccupations across years, creating invisible through-lines that only become visible in aggregate.
These patterns exist whether or not anyone records them, but most tools erase them entirely. They flatten reading into achievement metrics - books finished, pages consumed, goals met - as if the interesting thing about reading were its completion rather than its unfolding. I start from a different place: that reading behavior is meaningful in its natural form, not only when it’s been cleaned up into streaks and gamified progress.
What I believe about data, privacy, and attention
I believe data should help people understand themselves, not perform for others. Reading data is particularly intimate. It reveals curiosity, fear, desire, belief, distraction, and drift in ways that few other behavioral datasets do. When people feel watched, they read differently. They choose safer books, abandon less freely, perform taste rather than follow genuine interest. They create performative arbitrary annual reading goals that make reading worse, not better.
Any system that claims to offer insight into reading has to earn trust first, which means making hard architectural choices upfront. Local-first design. Clear ownership. No public rankings. No engagement incentives disguised as insight. I take data seriously, and I take restraint just as seriously - because not everything valuable about reading should be optimized, and some things are only measurable when they’re allowed to remain private.
What you’ll find here
I write at the intersection of reading, technology, culture, and data. You’ll find technical deep dives into building reading software alongside cultural essays about attention, taste, and reading communities. There will be data analysis of reader behavior and reading systems, founder reflections on building a privacy-first product in a surveillance economy, and clear critiques of tools that quietly make reading worse while claiming to make it better.
Some pieces are technical, some reflective, some analytical. All of them are written from the same point of view: that reading is a serious practice, that readers deserve serious tools, and that not everything valuable about reading can or should be quantified.
Who this is for
This is for people who care deeply about reading and want to understand it better - not in the aspirational sense of becoming the kind of person who reads, but in the practical sense of seeing clearly what their actual reading life looks like.
It’s for readers who notice patterns and want clarity instead of guesswork. For people who track other parts of their lives and wonder why reading remains stubbornly invisible. For romance readers, series readers, and genre readers who need real organizational infrastructure instead of literary fiction’s leftovers. For writers, researchers, and thinkers who reread and revisit ideas over years and need systems that acknowledge that reading isn’t always linear. For builders who care about privacy, local-first software, and human-scale systems. For readers who want insight without surveillance.
Why I’m writing this now
I’m building Epigramm because I want reading to be treated with the same seriousness we grant other forms of self-understanding - not in the sense of optimization, but in the sense of clarity. Clarity about how reading actually fits into a life, about what holds attention and what doesn’t, about long-running patterns that memory alone cannot reliably surface. Here's what we've been working on. Every decision starts with actual reader behavior, not imaginary use cases.
Epigramm launches in early 2026, and there’s still a great deal to build. This is where I think in public about the problems, the tradeoffs, and the philosophy behind the work. No hype, no urgency theater, no engagement tricks designed to simulate intimacy while extracting data. Reading deserves patience, and so do the tools we build around it.
If that resonates, welcome. I’m glad you’re here.
Which Reader Are You?
If you’ve ever felt like reading apps weren’t built for you, there’s a reason. Most are designed for one imaginary reader type, ignoring the other six.
Take the 2-minute reading personality quiz to discover your reader type and what you actually need from reading tools.