I was struggling with fully grasping the arguments in books—especially non-fiction—or forgetting them shortly after reading. While researching how to deal with this, I discovered the "active reading" method and decided to turn it into a mobile app.

Active reading has two main steps: consistently taking notes while reading, and regularly revisiting those notes. But it's not just about jotting things down; you need to argue with the author's ideas, agree with them, question them, or make your own stance clear. In the app I developed, Marginalia, you can categorize your notes using tags. This makes it easy to quickly adapt and recall the book when you revisit your notes later.

Speaking of revisiting notes, this brings us to the second step of active reading. Consistently reviewing your comments on a book helps you form your own ideas and keeps what you've read fresh in your memory. I highly recommend doing a quick review of your notes every time you sit down to read, right before diving back into the book. You'll really see the benefits the more you do it.

To help with this step, the dedicated "notes" page Marginalia creates for each book comes in really handy. On this page, you can access all your notes in one place and quickly review them. Plus, with the tag filtering system, you can easily find and focus on the specific ideas you want to explore further.

Besides the standard on-screen keyboard, I added handwriting support for those who, like me, enjoy taking notes with a stylus. And if you’d rather not type or write at all, there’s also a speech-to-text feature so you can simply speak your mind and capture your thoughts hands-free. For Obsidian and Notion users, there's also an option to export your notes as .md files.

If you read digitally and value taking notes, I'd love it if you gave the app a try and shared your thoughts with me. I'm completely open to all kinds of feedback and criticism!

[Here is the app webpage](http://usemarginalia.app)

App comes with a free version, monthly , yearly subs and LifeTime payment.  
Monthly - $1,99  
Yearly - $6,99  
Life TIme - $9,99

I was tired of forgetting non-fiction books weeks after reading them, so I built an app based on "active reading"