Questions we get a lot.

Meditations is the most popular on-ramp — it's free, short, and the structure of Marcus's daily reflections maps cleanly onto the Trivium method. If you want something more practical, The Art of War is also free and much terser. For something literary, try Tao Te Ching.

Yes, for your notebook to persist across sessions. Sign-up is just an email — no password required. Your free-tier access doesn't require a credit card.

A single unit (one argumentative move) takes about 5-10 minutes of real engagement across all three stages. Most books have 15-40 units, so finishing one takes anywhere from a weekend to a month depending on how much you read at a sitting.

It's a Socrates-style persona running on modern large language models (Anthropic's Claude for the dialogue, plus specialized models for text-to-speech on the Voice tier). The persona is tuned to ask rather than tell, to push on vagueness, and to reward honest engagement over perfect answers. It's explicitly instructed not to discuss anything outside the passage in front of you.

No. It'll lower the difficulty — ask a smaller, more concrete question — but it won't summarize the passage for you. That's by design. The point of the product is that you read the book.

After two honest attempts, Socrates advances you with whatever you've got. The product favors progress over perfectionism — stagnation is a worse failure than missing something on the first pass.

No. The teacher is scoped to the current passage. Ask about code, recipes, other books, current events, and it'll politely redirect you back to what you're working on. Readforth is a reading tool, not a general assistant.

Copyright on modern books is complicated and expensive, and Readforth's method works best on texts that have earned their place in the canon. Public-domain works from Project Gutenberg (Meditations, the Federalist Papers, Frankenstein, War and Peace, etc.) let us ship the full text openly, without licensing shadows, for a flat subscription.

Yes, if it's in the public domain in the US. Email us and we'll add it to the queue.

On the Reader + Voice tier, yes — EPUB or plain text. We run it through the same Trivium pipeline. Please upload only texts you have the legal right to use.

Modern cover designs are usually copyrighted by publishers even when the underlying text is public domain. Rather than risk it, every cover on Readforth is composed from permissively-licensed public-domain imagery (Wikimedia Commons) with typographic overlays. Full attribution is on the credits page.

Free for five foundational books. $9/month (or $60/year) unlocks the full library. $19/month (or $144/year) adds audio narration and hands-free voice-mode dialogue. See full pricing.

Yes. Cancellation is one click, and you keep access through the end of the billing period you've already paid for. Your notebook stays with your account forever.

Within 7 days of signup if you haven't used the product, yes — just email us. After that, cancellation stops future charges but doesn't refund past ones.

Not yet, but the free tier covers five real books including Meditations, The Art of War, and Huckleberry Finn — enough for a semester of any humanities class. If you're a teacher who wants classroom access, email us.

The AI that reads with you costs real money per turn. Without a cap, a single very active reader could cost us more than their subscription. The limits (50/300/500 turns per day across tiers) are set well above what a normal session needs — you'll rarely notice them. If you do hit one, we show a friendly message rather than billing you more.

You. Your notebook is scoped to your account, visible only when you're signed in. We do not sell it, we do not share it with third parties, and we do not train models on it.

Yes. Every insight block is exportable as plain text or Markdown from the notebook page. Book-level synthesis exports include the full reflection.

Your sessions, notebook, and personal data are permanently deleted within 30 days. See our privacy policy for specifics.

Your reader messages are sent to our AI provider (Anthropic) to generate the Socratic reply. Under our enterprise agreement, they don't retain it for training. See privacy for the full flow.

Yes, on iPhone (Safari) and Android (Chrome). It uses the browser's microphone and audio APIs plus our server-side TTS. Put in AirPods, tap Begin, and respond out loud — you won't need to touch the screen once a session is started.

Not yet as a native app. The web version is designed to feel app-like on mobile. A native wrapper is on the roadmap once we have enough users to justify the app-store overhead.

Not currently. The Socratic dialogue requires a network call to the AI. Voice-mode passages are pre-rendered and cached, but the dialogue itself is live.