Marcus Aurelius
Meditations
Book 1
Philosophy · ~24 min
Your next good read is already on your shelf.
Three chapters from your own books. Pick one, keep a thought, and meet it again as a recall card.
Open a chapter. See where it takes you.
Try the reader and leave a note. No account needed.
Start with a stocked shelf
Keep a thought.Meet it again.
A line worth keeping can become a conversation with your past self.
A saved highlight · example
“Give thyself leisure to learn some good thing”
Meditations · Book 2
Save a note in the reader above to see your own words here.
A small reading habit, with a way back.
Pick a chapter, leave a thought, and revisit what stayed with you.
Choose a chapter 
Read a little 
Keep one thought 
Recall it later
Why dealing beats willpower
A LITTLE READING SCIENCE
The forgetting curve
Memories fade fastest at first. A little return can help.
Everyone’s memory follows its own rhythm.Forgetting is the default.
Ebbinghaus measured it on himself in 1885; a 2015 replication found the same shape. Unshelve schedules each book's return against this curve — the longer one sits, the harder it knocks.
Ebbinghaus (1885); Murre & Dros (2015), PLOS ONE 10(7).
Testing beats re-reading.
A week out, the tested group kept half again as much as the re-readers. So we pose your notes back as thought-provoking questions, facilitated by powerful AI tools to help you with truly retaining the concepts!
Roediger & Karpicke (2006), Psychological Science 17(3), 249–255.
61%
retained a week later by the tested group
vs 40% for re-readers
63%
on the delayed test after mixed practice
vs 20% for blocked practice
A little variety helps ideas stick.
Switching between topics takes a little more effort, but it can help you remember what you learn. Unshelve brings you chapters from different books, so you can explore new ideas and return to familiar ones with fresh eyes.
Rohrer & Taylor (2007), Instructional Science 35, 481–498.
Start with a stocked shelf
The shelf comes stocked; the evidence comes cited.
This idea is thirty years old
Incremental reading has worked since the 1990s. It has just never been usable. SuperMemo proved the method; Kindle resurfaces highlights; Readwise tunes their frequency; interleave.app interleaves the extracts you clip. Unshelve's bet: skip the clipping — deal whole chapters of your own files (EPUB, PDF, Markdown), in a web app that follows you onto every device.
From the person building it
Unshelve just launched, and it's built by one person — for my own shelf first, because my books were losing to my feeds. Two things I can promise: every claim on this page carries its citation, and you'll find no testimonials below because there are no users to quote yet. You'd be early. That's the honest pitch.
Q&A
- Where do my files come from?
- Anywhere you can get DRM-free files: publisher-direct stores (O'Reilly, Manning, Pragmatic Bookshelf), Standard Ebooks and Project Gutenberg for the classics, plus the PDFs already on your disk — papers, reports, manuals. Books locked inside Kindle or Apple Books can't come in — that's a DRM wall.
- What formats does it read?
- EPUB (best — clean chapters, small files), PDF (rendered as-is, nothing flattened), and Markdown or plain text.
- Is my library private?
- Yes. Files live in your own account's storage, readable by you alone. There is no public shelf and no feed of what you read.
- What does it cost?
- Free right now, while it's early — no card, no trial clock. And your notes stay yours either way: one click exports everything as Markdown or an Anki file.
- What did the demo above actually do?
- It ran the app's real dealing engine over this page's sample books, entirely in your browser. No account was created. Your demo note lives only on this page and is gone when you close it.
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Add your own books when you're ready.