Read it once.Remember it for good.
Memreader is a reading app that helps you keep what you read. Bring your books and papers, highlight what matters, and turn those highlights into flashcards that come back before you forget.
1 · The Reach of Explanations
Summary
Fallibilism entails not looking to authorities but instead acknowledging that we may always be mistaken, and trying to correct errors. We do so by seeking good explanations – explanations that are hard to vary in the sense that changing the details would ruin the explanation. This, not experimental testing, was the decisive factor in the scientific revolution, and also in the unique, rapid, sustained progress in other fields that have participated in the Enlightenment.
Some of the resulting ideas have enormous reach: they explain more than what they were originally designed to. The reach of an explanation is an intrinsic attribute of it, not an assumption that we make about it as empiricism and inductivism claim.
Now I’ll say some more about appearance and reality, explanation and infinity.
Features
A reader and a memory, in one place.
Every feature is in the free version. There is no paid tier holding anything back, and no part of the app waiting behind an upgrade screen.
Your books, not a catalogue
Upload EPUB, PDF and DOCX. Nothing is rented to you and nothing is licensed by the month — it is your file, in your library.
A reader worth reading in
Nine typefaces, five text widths, light and dark, and typography measured down to the letterform rather than guessed at.
Highlighting that behaves
Select a sentence and get that sentence — in EPUBs, and in PDFs, where most reading tools quietly give up.
A flashcard in one keystroke
Press N on a passage. The passage becomes the answer, already filled in, and the cursor is waiting in the question.
Spaced repetition, built in
Cards come back on an FSRS schedule that adapts to you — just before you would have forgotten, and not before.
Export to Anki whenever
Your cards are never trapped here. One click gives you a deck you can open in Anki and keep for good.
How it works
Three steps, and the third one is automatic.
Reading, marking and remembering are usually three separate apps. Here they are the same one, so nothing has to be copied between them.
Add a book.
Drag in an EPUB, PDF or DOCX and it opens in seconds. It stays in your library, on any device you sign in from, and it is still just the file you uploaded.
Highlight while you read.
Select a passage and press H to keep it. Press N instead and a flashcard appears in the margin beside it, with the passage already filled in as the answer — you only write the question.
Practise what you kept.
Cards come back on a schedule that adapts to how well you actually recall them, so the ones you know get out of your way. Or export the lot to Anki and practise there instead — it is your deck either way.
Why it is free
Made to be yours.
The code is open.
Read it, change it, run your own copy on your own machine. Memreader is released under AGPL-3.0, the licence Anki uses, which keeps every improvement open for everyone who comes after.
Nothing is locked in.
Your books are the files you uploaded. Your highlights and flashcards export to Anki whenever you ask. You can leave and take all of it with you, which is the only promise about your data worth making.
No ads, no upsell, no plan.
There is no trial counting down, no feature greyed out with a padlock on it, and nothing to buy. Free software, in the sense that matters.
Contributing
Built in the open.
Memreader is a small project and it gets better when people who use it push back on it. You do not have to write code to help.
Read the code
The whole app — reader, flashcards, scheduler and server. Clone it, run it, and send a change back if you find something worth fixing.
Report a bug
A book that renders wrong or a highlight that lands in the wrong place is a real report. Say which book and what you saw; that is enough.
Ask for a feature
Most of what is in here came from someone reading and hitting a wall. If the app gets in your way, that is worth writing down.
Free, and open, and yours.
Bring one book and see whether you still remember it next month. That is the whole pitch.