Who is behind ReadersGuild?
ReadersGuild is a social reading app for iPhone. You start a session with one tap, the timer runs while you read, and what you read turns into a card worth sharing. You can open a fire, a room up to twenty friends can drop into, where everyone brings their own book and reads at the same time. It is free to start, and the app opens soon.
Who makes ReadersGuild?
It is built by Fabio Jonathan Arifin, working alone, under EchoForge. One person writes the app, the website, and the emails you get from us. When you write to [email protected], that is who reads it.
Why is ReadersGuild being built twice?
Because there was a first one, and it was shut down.
An earlier version of ReadersGuild existed and had real readers on it, people who had put their books, their sessions and their year into it. Closing it was the wrong call, and they are the ones who paid for it.
They get their place back first. Everyone who was there before returns as an Elder when the doors open. Most reading apps are somebody's first attempt. This is a second one, built by someone who already knows exactly what it costs to let readers down.
Where do the reading-speed numbers come from?
Nearly every reading-time calculator on the internet assumes 300 words a minute. We use 250.
The best evidence we could find is Brysbaert (2019), a meta-analysis of 190 studies, which puts silent adult reading of English prose at about 238 words a minute for non-fiction and 260 for fiction. 300 is faster than most people actually read, so every estimate built on it comes out short.
So our numbers will look longer than the ones you see elsewhere. They are closer to your actual evening. We show the working on every book page rather than asking you to take the figure on faith.
We also do not claim anyone reads 1,000 words a minute with full comprehension. Rayner et al. (2016) is clear that speed and understanding trade against each other, which is why our speed reading test scores you on comprehension-adjusted words a minute instead of raw pace.
- Brysbaert, M. (2019). How many words do we read per minute? A review and meta-analysis of reading rate. Journal of Memory and Language, 109.
- Rayner, K., Schotter, E. R., Masson, M. E. J., Potter, M. C., & Treiman, R. (2016). So much to read, so little time. Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 17(1).
What will ReadersGuild never do?
- Rank you against other readers. No leaderboards, no percentiles, no reader-versus-reader anything. Reading more than your friend is not an achievement.
- Invent a number. No star ratings until there are real ones to show, no made-up reader counts, no estimate presented as a measurement. Where we are guessing, the page says so.
- Hold your reading hostage. Your library, sessions and history are yours, and you can take them out.
The doors open soon.
Put your name down and you will hear from a person, once, on the day it is real.
Join the waitlist