Read more, not scroll more
I love reading, and I'm tired of apps that would rather I scrolled. So I built ReadIt — a reading app, in Spanish and made with love, whose whole reason to exist is to get you off the phone and back inside a book. If you read, this one is for you.
Somewhere along the way, the apps meant to help us read turned into places to not read. You open one to log a book, and twenty minutes later you're deep in a feed — a stranger's status, a hot take, an ad for a box set you'll never buy. The reading app became one more thing standing between you and the reading. And the one everyone lands on, Goodreads, is owned by Amazon, tuned for time-in-app and data, and it buries the single number I most want to see: how many people gave the book up.
So I built the one I wished existed: ReadIt — tu biblioteca en el bolsillo, your library in your pocket. Mobile-first, installable as an app, and built on one stubborn principle: the point is to read more, not to keep you here. Hecho con cariño para quien lee — made with care, for people who read.
A shelf, not a list
Your library isn't a list — it's a wall of shelves with spines you pick up and move with a finger. You decorate it: put a cat on it, change the wallpaper, make it yours. There are four shelves to start — Reading, Read, Wishlist, and Gave up — and you invent the rest. Yes, "Gave up" is a shelf, on purpose: abandoning a book also says something about who you are. And if you need one called "changed my life," you just make it.
Read in company, without spoilers
This is my favourite part. Walk into another reader's open library, pick up their copy of a book, and you'll see their highlights and the notes they left in the margins — the same book, a little different in every home. And when you read your own, you don't read alone: you see what other people underlined up to where you are, and everything further on stays sealed until you reach it. Company without spoilers — a quiet book club around every page.
The candle, not the scroll
There is no infinite scroll here. There's a candle. You light it and it burns down while you read — a warm little session of twenty-five minutes with nothing moving on the screen. And when you've been away from your books too long, ReadIt does the opposite of every other app: it nudges you to put the phone down. Its notifications say things like "the algorithm has had enough of you today — your book doesn't track you," or "nobody is going to like this, and that's exactly the point." It is the rare app whose best possible outcome is that you close it.
A whole reading life, in one place
Around all of that is everything else a reader's life has, built for readers and no one else:
- Book clubs with a shared reading checkpoint, so no one spoils what lies ahead.
- Events and a calendar — readings, meet-ups, launches.
- Challenges and badges you earn by reading, not by opening the app — including the one I'm fondest of, the Candle of 25.
- Streaks gentle enough to actually keep, and a reader "type" that slowly takes shape from what you read and underline.
- A marketplace to buy, sell and swap physical books with other readers, and a way to see what's being read near you.
- Search by a line — find a book by a sentence someone underlined.
- One-click import of your Goodreads and Kindle highlights, and a small blog for the longer thoughts.
What it refuses to be
No ads. No trackers — una cookie de sesión y ya, one session cookie and nothing more. No Amazon behind it. It isn't a social network with books bolted on; the people are there to help you find the next great read, not to farm your attention. Or, as the site itself puts it: leer más, no hacer amigos — read more, not make friends.
Come in early
ReadIt is invitation-only for now, while it finds its feet. But if you've read this far, you're exactly the reader it was built for — so here's a door in. The first 20 people to use this code get early access:
Invite code: 4HBK-WMQH — 20 uses, first come, first served.
Redeem it at readit.es, bring three books, and your shelf will already start to look like you.
I built ReadIt because reading is the quietest, most stubborn antidote to the feed I know, and the tools around it had forgotten that. If you love reading, this is the shelf I made for you.