Timeful Texts

As a medium, books have no direct means of communicating with readers over time. The physical text is stuck on the page, generally read linearly and continuously in a few sittings.

To be transformed by a book, readers must do more than absorb information: they must bathe in the book’s ideas, relate those ideas to experiences in their lives over weeks and months, try on the book’s mental models like a new hat. Unfortunately, readers must drive that process for themselves. Authors can’t easily guide this ongoing sense-making: t... See more

To engage with a book’s ideas over time, readers must remember its details, and that’s already a challenge. One promising solution lies in spaced repetition memory systems, which allow users to retain large quantities of knowledge reliably and efficiently.