One Library for Books, Articles and Feeds
The reading you mean to do is spread across a bookshelf app, a browser's tabs, a feed reader and a notes app, and nothing in one of them can find anything in another. pimReader puts all of it in one library, with one search and one reading view. Here is how to set it up so it stays usable.
Most people do not have a reading problem. They have a finding problem. The article is in a tab from last week, the book is in one app, the feed is in another, and the note you made about the book is in a fourth. Nothing links, so nothing gets finished and nothing gets found again.
The fix is not a better filing system. It is one place, so that the search, the dictionary, the notes and the review schedule all see the same material.
What goes in
Books. EPUB, PDF, TXT, HTML and Markdown. Load them from the device or from any file browser the phone can see.
Articles. Save a web page and it is cleaned down to its text — no banners, no popups — and kept for offline reading.
Feeds. RSS and Atom, OPDS catalogues, X accounts and Telegram channels, all in the same list. If you already keep a feed list elsewhere, import it as OPML instead of re-adding sources by hand; export works the same way, so the list is never locked in.
Your own notes. Anything you capture while reading — a passage, a comment, a flashcard — is filed under the book or article it came from.
Everything in the list above is the same kind of object once it is inside: it opens in the same reader, with the same dictionary, and it turns up in the same search.
Organise by theme, not by source
Two tools, and a rule for using them.
Folders hold things that belong together for a purpose: a course you are working through, a project, a book's notes. Make one when you have a reason to open it later, not before.
Tags cut across folders. formulas, to-discuss, easily-confused, a language, a client. A tag is for the question you will ask in three months — "everything I saved about pricing" — regardless of where it came from.
The rule: organise by what you will search for, never by where it came from. "Chapter 4" and "from the Economist" are facts you will never search by. "Causes", "numbers", "disagreements" are.
The library itself groups by date and indexes by author whatever the source, so the structure you get for free is already a sensible one. Add folders and tags only on top of it.
Find it by meaning
Ordinary search finds a word. Semantic search finds a meaning — across your books, saved articles and notes together — so "where did I read about retention policy?" works even when the passage never uses those words.
For a busy feed, sort by relevance to a topic instead of by time: name what you care about today and the closest articles rise to the top of the list. After a few weeks of reading, pimReader can also build a recommendation list from your own history — what you actually read, not what you clicked.
These are the payoff for keeping everything in one place. A search across one app is only as good as what is in that app.
Decide before you read
Not everything that arrives deserves to be read. Two habits keep a large library from becoming a backlog:
- Ask for a summary first when an article buries its point. Read the summary; open the article only if it earns it.
- Mark the rest read without guilt. Subscribing to a source is not a promise to read everything it publishes.
The aim is to go from everything that arrived to the handful worth your evening.
Read it here, and keep what matters
Whatever you open reads the same way: paged like a book, with words translated above the line if you are reading in another language, and the same dictionary a tap away.
Anything worth keeping — a passage, a fact, a word — becomes a note or a flashcard with one action, filed under its source. Months later you can walk from the card back to the page it came from and read the sentence around it again. That is the point of the notes living in the same library as the books: nothing is retyped, and nothing is stranded in an app that has forgotten where it came from.
Setting it up
- Load the books you are actually reading now. Not your whole shelf — the three or four you will open this month.
- Import your feeds as OPML, or add the five sources you would miss.
- Make one folder for the thing you are currently working on. Stop there.
- Add tags as questions come up, not in advance.
- Save articles into the library instead of leaving them in tabs. The tab will be gone by Friday; the library will not.
Then read. The organising happens as a by-product of reading — a tag here, a note there — and the search is what turns it back into something useful.