It’s a fair question.
Readers aren’t exactly short of apps.
Goodreads has spent years helping us track what we’ve read, see what our friends are reading, review books and decide what to read next. StoryGraph has taken reading tracking further with statistics, personalized recommendations, moods and reading journals. Fable has put community front and center with social feeds, book clubs, discussions and a reading experience of its own.
The interesting part is inside the book
Think about the last book you loved.
You probably remember the title. You might remember what you rated it.
But somewhere along the way there may have been a sentence you read twice. A paragraph you highlighted. Something you disagreed with. A thought you wanted to remember. A passage you sent to somebody because they had to read it.
To me, those moments say more about our experience with a book than a star rating ever could.
And yet they’re often the part of reading we preserve the least.
Kindle highlights accumulate by the hundreds. Notes get scattered between apps and notebooks. Physical books disappear back onto shelves with underlined passages we may not find again for years.
That’s the space I wanted Proxie to occupy.
Not just what you read. What stayed with you.
Proxie still has the things you’d expect from a modern reading platform: a digital bookshelf, reading history, recommendations, Reader Profiles and a community of other readers.
But those aren’t the destination.
The heart of Proxie is the passages we save and the thoughts we attach to them.
Readers can bring in their Kindle highlights, save Marked Passages, write Margin Notes and Reflections, and use PAIGE — Proxie’s reading assistant — to help capture thoughts along the way.
I don’t want PAIGE telling somebody they need to read for 37 more minutes today.
Reading doesn’t need another stopwatch.
I’d rather help someone preserve the one paragraph they read in five minutes that they still remember five years later.
Because when you finish a 300-page book, you don’t necessarily need another 300 pages to remember why it mattered.
Sometimes what you really want is the book you took away from the book.
Turning a digital read into something physical
This is where Proxie becomes something very different.
For many readers now, the entire experience of a book happens on a Kindle. You buy it digitally, read it digitally, highlight it digitally — and when you’re finished, there may be nothing physical to put on the shelf.
Of course, you can always buy a copy of the original book.
But that gives you the author’s book again.
What if you could also keep a physical record of your experience with it?
The highlights, notes and reflections you’ve collected can become your own printed Proxie Edition.
Not a reproduction of the original book.
Not a replacement for reading it.
A record of what you carried out of it.
Your passages. Your Margin Notes. Your Reflections. The ideas, characters, arguments and moments you decided were worth keeping.
A 300-page read might ultimately leave you with a much smaller collection of the moments that mattered specifically to you.
For a novel, that might mean the lines and characters you couldn’t stop thinking about.
For a business or nonfiction book, it might become a personal reference you can pull from the shelf months later and quickly revisit the ideas you highlighted, the observations you made and the lessons you wanted to put into practice.
You could even share that record with a colleague or employee and say, “These are the parts I thought were worth talking about.”
There is something I love about the idea that two people could read exactly the same book and finish with two completely different Editions.
Because that’s what reading really is.
The book is the same. The reading of it is not.
More than another book on the shelf
There’s another part of this that matters to me.
Bookshelves have always been personal. The books we choose to keep say something about us.
But increasingly, some of our most important reading never reaches the shelf at all.
It lives on a Kindle.
I like the idea of changing that.
Not by simply recreating the book you already read, but by giving the experience itself a physical form.
Years later, a Proxie Edition shouldn’t just tell you, I read this.
It should remind you:
This is why this one mattered.
A different kind of reading community
That idea also changes what a reading community can be built around.
I enjoy seeing what someone rated a book. But I’m much more interested in why it mattered to them.
Show me the sentence that stopped you.
Show me what you wrote beside it.
Show me the passage three different readers saved — and the completely different reasons each one did.
That’s the community I want Proxie to become:
A reading community built around the passages we share.
Goodreads, StoryGraph and Fable have each helped rethink different parts of how readers track, discover and talk about books.
I’m not trying to build a replacement for them.
I’m trying to preserve something I think we’ve largely left behind:
the reader’s copy of the story.
The physical book preserves what the author wrote.
A Proxie Edition preserves what the reader kept.
Because finishing a book shouldn’t necessarily be the end of it.
Sometimes the best parts are the ones we take with us.
This is a guest blog by Matthew Jones:
About the author: Matthew Jones is the founder of Proxie, a reading platform built around the passages readers save, the thoughts they add, and the books those memories can become. Readers can build a digital bookshelf, import Kindle highlights, connect with other readers and turn their highlights, Margin Notes and Reflections into a personal printed Proxie Edition. Learn more at proxiebooks.com.
