Reading that remembers

ReadAware 0.1 is out today, for macOS, Windows, and Linux. It is a reading app — another one — and this post is about why we thought the world needed it anyway.

Highlights go nowhere

Every serious reader we know has the same ritual. You read, you mark the passages that matter, and the marks accumulate somewhere you will honestly never look again. The highlight was the point of contact — the moment a book actually changed what you were thinking — and the software treats it as an archive entry.

The AI chat era made this stranger, not better. You can now paste a chapter into a chatbot and have a genuinely good conversation about it. But the conversation evaporates. Next book, next chat, blank slate. The assistant that discussed Meditations with you last month has no idea it ever happened.

Memory, not transcripts

ReadAware is built around one idea: the unit of intelligence in a reading app is not the book, it is your reading — the trail of highlights, notes, questions, and conversations you leave across books. So the app is designed memory-first:

• Every book has one continuous conversation. You never manage chat threads inside a book; you just keep talking.
• The assistant does not reread an ever-growing transcript. What matters is distilled into durable memory — what you are reading, what you asked, what you keep coming back to — and recalled when it is relevant.
• Your highlights and notes are not an archive. They are material the assistant actually works from.

Ask "how does this connect to the last book I read?" and that question makes sense here. That is the product.

One reader, every format

The mundane half of the product had to be right, too. EPUB, MOBI, AZW3, FB2, and PDF all open in the same reader with the same selection, annotation, and progress model. Nothing is converted — the file you import is the file you keep. DRM-locked files are the one thing we cannot open, and the app says so plainly instead of pretending.

Yours, on your machine

Your library, annotations, and the memory the app builds all live on your device. AI runs on a key you bring, talking directly to your provider. There is no account and no server reading your books. More on this in a coming post — it is a deliberate architecture, not a temporary state.

ReadAware is free, and it is young — 0.1 means 0.1. If you read seriously and want your reading to accumulate into something, install it and tell us what breaks.