Reading, kept whole.
Reader's Friend began with a small frustration: the best thing about a book — the thought it sparked at 11pm, the line you underlined twice — was always the first thing to disappear. Apps counted our pages and forgot our minds.
We're a product of Life in Stereo, a small company that believes the things we make should feel like paper and ink, not screens and dashboards. The name gives us our guiding idea — two channels in harmony. For reading, those channels are the two halves of the act itself: the private one, where you and the page are alone, and the shared one, where a book becomes something you talk about.
So Reader's Friend holds both. A quiet, well-lit place to track what you're reading and write in the margin — and, when you want it, a room where a handful of friends read the same book at the same pace and argue about the footnotes. Warm channel and cool channel. Clay and spruce.
“A book you've annotated is a conversation you can return to. We just wanted to keep the conversation.”
We're a long way from finished — but we're building it the way we'd want to read: slowly, with care, and in good company. If that sounds like your kind of thing, we'd love to have you.