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Why we're building Quire
Reading a book with other people should feel like sitting at the same table. Here is what we are building, and what we are not.
Most good books are better with company. A book club, a study group, a team working through the same engineering book: the reading is solitary, but the understanding happens when people compare notes.
The tools for that are scattered. Someone shares a screenshot of a page in a group chat. Someone else is two chapters behind and scrolls past it. A question about a tricky paragraph gets an answer from a chatbot that has never seen the paragraph. Quire is our attempt to put all of that in one place.
What Quire is
Quire is a shared reading space for a group and one book.
- A room per book. You create a room, invite your group, and everyone reads the same book together.
- One upload per room. One member uploads the PDF, and everyone who owns the book reads it after confirming they do. Anyone can still bring their own edition: Quire lines copies up by chapter and text, so a highlight in your edition points to the same passage in mine.
- Discussion anchored to the text. Threads hang off highlighted passages, not off a timestamp in a chat log.
- Spoiler-safe by default. Everyone has a reading position: a chapter and how far into it they are. Discussions and answers past your position stay hidden until you get there.
Quill
Quill is the agent inside every room. Ask it about the passage in front of you and it answers from that passage, with citations you can click back to. It can also turn a chapter into a quiz or a set of flashcards.
Two rules shape how Quill works:
- It only knows what you have read. Quill reads your copy, up to your position. It will not explain chapter 9 to someone on chapter 3.
- Its answers are yours. Answers are private by default. You choose when to share one with the room.
What we are not building (yet)
We would rather do a few things well. The beta supports text-based PDFs and YouTube videos as companion material. EPUB, scanned books, voice, and public rooms are not part of it. Rooms are private and joined by invite.
The beta
Quire is in a free, invite-only beta. If you read with other people, we would like to hear from you. Join the waitlist and we will send an invite as rooms open up.