To give the long, quiet sentence a place to live again.

A reader is a tool, but it is also a kind of room. We build the room because we care, very much, about what gets thought there.

The problem we are working on

The average person reads roughly fifteen books a year — and looks at a phone for nearly five hours a day. Of those five hours, almost none is spent in continuous, uninterrupted prose. The economics of attention reward fragments: a tweet, a clip, a notification. The economics of thought, however, reward continuity. There is a long sentence inside Hannah Arendt's The Human Condition that runs for half a page, and you cannot understand the second half without the first. The infrastructure for reading her, today, is poor.

We do not believe the answer is to make people feel guilty about their phones. We believe the answer is to build the alternative — patient, beautiful, unhurried — and let it speak for itself.

What "mission" means here

"Mission" is an overused word in software. We mean it in a smaller, older sense: a thing one is sent to do. Ours is this:

To make a place where a careful reader can spend an hour, an evening, or a winter — and come out with their attention intact, their notes in their own hand, and their books still on their own shelf.

How we measure success

Most software is measured in daily active users. We don't measure that, because we don't track that. (We genuinely don't know how many people use Lexis on any given day. We get told, by letter.)

Instead we ask ourselves four questions, every quarter, in writing:

1. Did we ship something we are proud of? Not "shipped fast." Proud.
2. Did our readers finish more books? We hear about it from them, in letters. We keep the letters.
3. Did we say no to a feature we were tempted by? If the answer is no, we are probably building the wrong thing.
4. Are the people who use Lexis still recommending it to someone they love? This is the only metric that has ever mattered.

What we are not

• We are not focused on solving every problem in technology, just making reading accessible.
• We are not interested in your data.
• We are not ...always working on just this platform, we build others but we are deeply committed to this.
• We are not your "reading partner" or your "reading coach." We are a reader. You are the reader.

The longer arc

Lexis is a passion project. We expect to be making it in 2034. We expect the file format we publish today, the .lex specification, to still open in 2044. We expect the marginalia you write this evening to be readable by your grandchildren, with or without us. The reader is a tool. The library is yours.

If we ever stop, we have committed — in writing, in the license — to release Lexis as open source so that no one's library is held hostage to our continued existence. The lamp stays on.

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