When you read a book, there is a reason behind every passage you choose to highlight.
But once you have highlighted them, most of those passages stay in WeRead, rarely revisited. And when you do want to look back, the original line is often hard to find.
On a road trip in May, a friend called me. We read and highlight in WeRead every day, he said. Why not build something that lets us revisit and share those highlights? WeRead had just released a Skill, and the next day I wrote the first version of Readmate. I thought it would be a side project I could wrap up in two days. But the more I used it, the more I felt something was still missing.
How should the books be arranged? How could sharing feel better, whether it was a single sentence or a whole passage? If I never opened the app, would those highlights end up forgotten in a corner again? One question led to another, and I have kept working on it ever since.
Along the way, I noticed something else. I had only meant to gather the highlights scattered across WeRead, but I found myself spending more and more time reading. Sometimes, while waiting for a ride or glancing at a widget before bed, a line I had long forgotten would remind me why I had picked up that book, and why I had chosen to highlight that particular sentence.
Highlights hold more than the words in a book. They also hold something of who you were when you read them. A sentence that resonated deeply a few years ago might no longer feel true today. Coming across an old highlight can feel like meeting a past version of yourself.
To my surprise, friends who had used it for a while all independently described the same feeling. This little app seemed to be genuinely changing our relationship with reading.
Something another friend once said about reading has stayed with me:
Reading is a way of talking with authors and with the classics.
Later, I began to think that highlights are the traces those conversations leave behind, whether we are talking with an author or with ourselves. Some we have forgotten. Others mean something entirely different when we read them again. What I want to do is reopen that conversation.
Readmate syncs your books and highlights from WeRead onto your own shelf. Every now and then, through widgets and reminders, it brings you back to them.
Some lines are worth reading again.
Some lines stay with you longer than the book itself.