A small team with great attention.
Lexis Reader is made by a handful of people in Melbourne, with a kettle on, a notebook open, and the firm conviction that software for reading should feel like a place — not a feed.
Lexis began as a personal protest. I had been reading on my PC and phone for a decade, and I noticed — not all at once, but slowly, the way one notices a draft in an old house — that I was finishing fewer books. The reading apps I used were polite about it. They offered streaks, and progress bars, and little confetti animations when I closed the app. None of them asked me what I had thought.
So I started building a reader for the kind of reading I missed: the kind where you stop, and underline a sentence, and write something in the margin that you'll be embarrassed by in ten years. Where the book is a place, not a checklist. Where the page is the unit of attention, and where what you wrote in the margins is yours forever.
What we believe
Not a feed. Not a stream. Not a queue. A place you go, and stay, and come back to.
Annotations are stored as plain text in your own folder. The reader is a tool — not a landlord.
No streaks. No reading speed. No leaderboards. The pace of a book is set by the book.
A reader you use for hours every week deserves typography you don't notice — because it is good.
Your library lives on your machine. The cloud is an option you turn on, not a condition you accept.
We'd rather have 4,000 readers who love it than 4,000,000 who shrug. The math is kinder.
The maker
Hi — I'm Michael. I am a university lecturer, researcher and AI ethicist, who also likes to build purposeful software, say hello.
What we don't do
- We don't track you. There is no analytics on this website. There are no analytics in the app.
- We don't sell ads, data, attention, or "engagement."
- We don't have a Discord, its good but we don't have one. (We have a mailbox, and we read every letter.)
- We don't ship features quickly. We ship them carefully. We are not perfect but we are purposeful.
- We don't rank you against other readers. There is nothing to win here.
Pen-name index
Things we do that are not, strictly, the app: we publish Notes from the Margin, a quarterly letter on reading and software (sadly email only, no paper, but also free); we maintain an open file format for annotations so your notes survive us; we keep a public changelog written like a diary.