Built by a reader who kept losing the best part.
Margin started as a stack of index cards, then a notes app that got too long, then a spreadsheet, then, eventually, a project worth actually building. It's made by Bri Brunner, a reader who kept wanting a quieter place to keep the ideas that stuck.
The long version.
I've been a reader for as long as I can remember, and a terrible archivist for exactly the same amount of time. I'd finish a book, feel the shape of it rearranging something, and then watch most of it slip away over the next few weeks. The sentence that stopped me, gone. The question it put in my head, replaced by whatever came next.
I tried the usual answers. Marginalia in the book itself, if I owned it. A notes app that eventually became unreadable. A spreadsheet, briefly and shamefully. None of them held the two things I actually wanted in the same place: the words from the page, and whatever I was thinking when I read them.
Margin is the app I kept wishing existed. It's deliberately not a tracker, not a leaderboard, not a feed demanding reactions. It's a quiet place to keep notes next to the books that made them, and, when you feel like it, to see what other people wrote in the same margin.
It's being built slowly, in the open, and shaped by the people using it. If that's you, thank you, and please send a note.
What this project believes
A few things that aren't going to change.
- i. Reading is a conversation.
- Between you and the writer, between you and the version of yourself who read the book, and, sometimes, between you and another reader. Margin wants to make all three easier.
- ii. Privacy is a feature.
- Your reading life is yours. Every book, every note, every list has a privacy toggle. Public by choice, never by default.
- iii. Slow software is fine.
- Margin ships features when they're ready to live in your reading life, not when they're ready for a changelog post.
- iv. The reader is the point.
- If a feature would make the app louder but your reading quieter, we don't ship it.
Elsewhere
Keep in touch.
Bri writes about reading, software, and whatever's on the desk at the moment on a personal site. For Margin-specific feedback, the form is the fastest route.