The digital bookmarker

Tip: use your arrow keys to navigate

When I had some trouble reading in elementary school, my teacher advised me to keep a paper bookmarker beneath each sentence. And move it along every time I got to the next.

I quickly abandoned this as moving that bookmarker every sentence was a hassle. But to be fair, consistently knowing where you were did bring a sense of calm to the reading process.

For the past six months, I've been using Readwise Reader. It's an app where you collect, read, and highlight articles. The app has something that reminds me of the bookmarker in elementery school. It displays a bar on the side indicating your position. You can navigate through the article using arrow keys.

This principle works so well for me that I put every online article I read into Readwise Reader first. This made me wonder:

Why don't more websites do this?

To better understand the concept, I developed it for this website. If you're reading this on a computer, you can navigate through this article using the arrow keys.

I am curious to know what you think. Does this make reading more accessible? Should websites like CNN.com implement this too? Or is it just unnecessary bloat?

Thanks for reading! Have any questions, feedback, or ideas to share? Feel free to send me an email at vic@vic-luijkx.nl 🙂.