March 2026

Why I Built Lectr

I read a lot. Over the years I’ve accumulated thousands of highlights on my Kindle, scribbled notes in margins, dog-eared pages I meant to come back to. All of it scattered.

I wanted a simple tool to hold it all together. Nothing I found did exactly what I wanted.

Too Much, Not Enough

The existing apps fell into two camps. On one side, the big social platforms (Goodreads and its descendants) which are really about sharing, reviewing, and community. I don’t want to broadcast my reading. I don’t want affiliate links nudging me to buy the next book. I just want to think about what I’ve read.

On the other side, subscription apps with beautiful marketing and feature lists as long as your arm. The subscription model sat badly with me. I didn’t want to rent my reading notebook.

What I wanted was a carefully chosen set of features done really well.

No Streaks

I have a particular dislike of streak tracking. The idea that I should read every day, and that breaking the chain is some kind of failure, turns a pleasure into a chore. Lectr has no streaks and no gamification.

Private by Default

Lectr has no accounts, no tracking, and no ads. Your data lives on your device, synced through your iCloud account, not through any server I control. I cannot see your library.

Built for Performance

The engineering side of me cared about things most users will never consciously notice, but will feel.

I benchmarked Lectr with 10,000 books in the library to make sure it stayed fast. A tool you use every day has to feel solid.

Built with Modern Tools

I built Lectr in a few intensive weeks of evenings and weekends, which would have been impossible a couple of years ago. I used Claude Code extensively, an AI coding assistant from Anthropic. It’s become an essential part of how I work.

Ten Years of Highlights

The moment that convinced me Lectr was worth building wasn’t a feature completing or a milestone shipping. It was importing my Kindle clippings.

More than ten years of highlights came flooding in.

I found my first Kindle purchase.

Reading More

An unexpected thing happened after I started using Lectr daily: I read more. Having a place to put my thoughts made the reading feel more worthwhile. The Kindle import alone was worth the effort of building the whole app. Years of content I’d stored but had no convenient way to explore, suddenly organised and searchable.

What Lectr Is

Lectr is a reading notebook. It helps you store and organise what you read. It’s private, fast, and calm. No accounts, no ads. The anti-social reading app. One time purchase, subscription free.

— John

Lectr is available on the App Store for iOS. One-time purchase, no subscription. Android - coming April 2026.