ReadingRate · What's new · 2026-01-28
Answers that draw on academic writing about a book
When you ask ReadingRate about a book, the answer can draw on academic writing about that book. Papers are found through OpenAlex, ranked by how often they have been cited, distilled to a one-sentence argument each, and pulled into a conversation when they bear on what you asked — so an answer can tell you what a named scholar argued rather than only what a model thinks. Coverage is small: a few dozen books so far, growing nightly.
Available on web and iOS.
The gap this fills is between what a general model has absorbed about a novel and what has actually been written about it. Criticism is where the interesting disagreements live, and most of it sits behind a search interface nobody opens mid-chapter.
Papers are gathered for books your journal has been active in recently rather than for the whole catalogue, ten a night. The accumulation is slow by design.
What it can't do
- Coverage is thin: a few dozen books out of roughly six thousand in the catalogue. Most books have none.
- The one-sentence argument attached to each paper is written by a model from the abstract. It is a paraphrase, not a quotation, and a hedged scholarly claim comes out firmer than the original.
- Papers are found by searching titles, which also turns up editions of the book itself. Not everything in the set is scholarship.
- Names and years appear in answers, but no links. You have to look a paper up yourself to read it.
- It reaches you only through the AI conversation, which is a membership feature.
Questions people ask
- Does ReadingRate use academic sources?
- For some books, yes. Papers are found through OpenAlex and summarised to a sentence each, then drawn into answers about that book. Coverage is small and the summaries are model-written, so treat a name in an answer as a lead to follow rather than a quotation.