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Two Latin words, joined. Neither of them is about speed — and neither, in the end, is this.
Why this exists
Everything in this library is public domain. It was free a century ago, it is free on Project Gutenberg this afternoon, and it will be free long after we are gone. Nobody has ever been stopped from reading Meditations by the price of Meditations.
What stops people is something else, and it is not intelligence either. It is that a great book reads as an open-ended commitment — a thing you begin with no idea whether you will still be at it in March — and that the prose is genuinely denser than what most of us read all day. The barrier was never access. It is the reading itself, and that is the only part worth working on.
So: put the real number of hours on every book, so the commitment stops being open-ended. Bend the pace to the words you actually know instead of a number you guessed once. Then give the page back. A reading speed that only exists inside one app is not something you own, it is somewhere you visit — which is why the trainer walks you from a single moving word to an ordinary page with no marker on it at all.
We would rather you finish the book and cancel.
What reading is for
This is the part that is easy to say cheaply and is nonetheless true. A word is not a label stuck on something you already understood. It is a distinction — a cut in the world you could not make before you had it, and can never quite stop making afterwards. Learning one is not decoration. It is a small permanent change in what you are able to notice.
Something a little harder than you would have chosen on your own. That is the entire entry fee, and it is the only step that takes any willpower.
Not a hard word for its own sake. A word that is there because the writer needed exactly it, and nothing easier would carry the weight.
Here is the whole argument. You are not being handed a synonym. You are being handed a thing you can now think — and name, and notice, and disagree with.
Words are how thought gets carried and stored. Each one you take on is another edge you can find in a problem, another distinction you can hold two of at once.
Vocabulary is the greater part of what makes hard prose hard. Learn a writer’s words and that writer gets easier — and so does the next one, who borrowed half of them.
And so you read more
That last step is not a figure of speech, and we can put a number on it because the reader is counting. Every word you pass is remembered, and the pace stops slowing for a word once you have met it enough times. Reading The Wealth of Nations once carries 2,941 distinct words past that point. The book teaches you its own vocabulary on the way through and hands the speed back before the end — and the words are not Smith’s private property. They are the words of everyone who argued with him afterwards.
Which is why the vocabulary test is not a party trick bolted onto a reading app. It is the measurement that matters most here, and it is the one we would most like to move.
How we mean to behave
Not for as long as you keep paying. Permanently, including after you stop. Cancelling ends the next month’s books; it does not empty the shelf you already filled, and it never reaches into a book you are halfway through. Credits you have paid for and not yet spent stay spendable too — they were yours before you cancelled and they do not evaporate because you did.
Books are downloaded to your device rather than streamed past you, so one you own opens with the network off. The reader, the pacing and the whole reading test are free and stay free — a membership buys books and the training that moves your pace off the app and onto a page. And nothing is called premium here until it is finished: we do not put a half-built thing behind a price and call the price a roadmap.
Liminanotio
līmen, līminis n.
A threshold. A doorway. The lintel over it — the beam you pass beneath on the way in.
It survives in liminal, in preliminary, and in eliminate, which meant, before it meant anything colder, to put a thing out of doors. Sublime is the same threshold seen from below: as high as the lintel.
nōtiō, nōtiōnis f.
A coming-to-know. An examination. The conception you arrive at by looking into something.
From nōscere, to know. It gives us notion directly, and stands cousin to notice and to cognition. Note that it is a knowing that happens, not a fact that sits there already known.
Read one way, the threshold of knowing — the doorway you stand in before understanding. Read the other way round, the idea at the doorway: the thought already waiting there when you arrive.
Saying it
We say LIM-ih-nuh-NOH-tee-oh, which is how a Roman would have said that -ti-. The other reading is lim-ih-nuh-NOH-shee-oh, which is how the same ending travelled through church Latin into English and came out as the -tion in notion, attention and every word like them.
So the second version is not a mistake. It is the same word arriving by the later road, and if it is the one that comes out of your mouth, you are in the company of most of the English language. We just prefer the older road.
What we do
Liminanotio shows one word at a time, in one place, so your eyes stop travelling. Most of what reading costs is transport — the jump between words, the doubling back over a line already read. Hold the words still and that expense disappears.
The pace is not fixed. It bends to the length of a word, to how common that word is, and to how many times you personally have read it before, so you are not held on the as long as on aforethought. You can watch the difference between the three modes on one passage.
The library is public-domain classics, taken from Project Gutenberg, each one fingerprinted at ingestion so it can be checked afterwards against the source it came from. Every book carries the hours it will actually take you — counted from the full text rather than estimated from a page count, and recalculated against your own pace once you have measured it. Your place is kept in every book at once, and a book you own is downloaded to the device, so it opens whether or not you are online.
You can read a chapter here before anything else — no account, nothing to install. A book is 2.99 on its own, or a membership carries the trainer and a monthly allowance of them.
Start reading today.
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