✎essay
Why I paused Reading Room
A short retrospective. I learned the answer to my own question, and the answer was "build something else."
The original premise of Reading Room was: a dedicated app whose only job is to stage a single document for deep reading. I built three rough versions over four months and used each for a week.
The retrospective, in plain English: the staging was never the problem. The problem was always the annotation. A reading room with no margin is a quiet hotel; you sleep well, but you don’t think.
Hence Margin. The next iteration of this work belongs there.