Jottings

Annotate your books.

An underline tells you where you stopped. It never tells you why. Come back a year later and the marked page is a stranger’s — you can see that something struck you, and not what it was.

Jottings keeps the sentence and the thought together, before you turn the page.

What it’s for

Never putting the book down
Both hands are busy holding it open. Speak your thought and carry on reading, or mark the line and type — either way the note is made while the thought is still warm, and not at the end of the chapter when it has cooled into nothing.
The author’s words, not your memory of them
Jottings reads the printed page, so what you keep is the line exactly as it was set. No retyping, no paraphrase that quietly drifts from what was actually written.
Finding it again on paper
Every note carries its page number, so it leads back to the book on your shelf and not only to a screen. Quote it, argue with it, look up what came next.
Turning up with something to say
Notes collect under the book they came from, in page order. Walk into a reading group with the passages and what you made of them, instead of the feeling that you had a point somewhere around chapter six.
A year of reading you can actually look back on
Export any book as plain text whenever you like. The notes are yours, in a form nothing can take away or stop supporting.

What a note looks like

The passage exactly as it is printed, and underneath it, what you said about it. Jottings finds the page number on its own.

In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit. Not a nasty, dirty, wet hole, filled with the ends of worms and an oozy smell.

tells you what it isn’t for three lines before what it is. worms, an oozy smell — then comfort. does it land harder that way?

p. 3

Your shelf

Notes collect under the book they came from.

···

What happens to what you say

The photograph of the page
Never leaves your phone. It is read where it was taken, and deleted the moment it has been read.
Your voice, if you speak a note
Sent once to be turned into words, then discarded. It is never stored and never used to train anything. A note you type is never sent anywhere to be read at all.
The passage and your note
Kept, because they are the point. Yours to export whenever.

Your number is how your notes find you: sign in on another phone and they are there.

Getting it

Jottings is coming to the iPhone. It is built for one reader in particular and the reading circle he keeps it for, which is the reason it does one thing rather than forty.