SMF·READWISE-READER
Can a prompt replace Readwise Reader?
Read it later & RSS — reader + highlights
Exhibit tracking slip
Verdict
A self-hosted reading app — save an article by URL, extract clean text, highlight passages, export everything to Markdown — is a real weekend build covering the daily-use core. What doesn't come with it is Readwise's actual depth: mature parsing across difficult sites, RSS and PDF ingestion, Kindle integration, and a spaced-repetition review system.
Exhibit A — The prompt
Received on30.07.2026Build a personal read-it-later app: a bookmarklet posts the current page's URL to your server, which extracts clean readable text and stores the title, author, site, and cleaned content — falling back to just the bare link with a clear 'source only' badge when extraction fails, rather than mangling the page. Build a reading view with an estimated read time and select-to-highlight, storing each highlight with its surrounding context. Organize saved articles into an inbox, an archive, and tag-based lists. Build a highlights page grouped by article, with a scheduled export of everything to dated Markdown files so highlights outlive the app regardless of what happens to it. Add full-text search across both articles and highlights.
Do not build RSS ingestion, PDF or ebook parsing, Kindle sync, or mobile apps — the browser and the bookmarklet are the entire capture surface here, and that's the honest, complete scope for a personal tool.Opening prefills the prompt — press enter to run it.
Exhibit B — What you lose
- B.1 parsing quality tuned across years of difficult websites
- B.2 mobile and offline apps
- B.3 Kindle highlight integration
- B.4 RSS and PDF ingestion
- B.5 a spaced-repetition review system
Prior art
Exhibit C — Why people still pay: capture/sync/integrations
All of someone's reading inputs — articles, Kindle highlights, PDFs, RSS — flow into one durable highlight system; people pay for that consolidation, not for highlighting text itself.
Questions
Can I import my existing Readwise Reader library?
Readwise lets you export your highlights, and a short script can convert that export into this build's format. The original article HTML and reading position generally don't come across, only the saved highlights.
Will it work on my phone?
As a responsive web page, yes, for reading and highlighting, but there's no offline mode and no dedicated mobile app — you need a network connection to reach it.
What does it cost to run?
Hosting and a database, typically a few dollars a month.
What's the one thing that doesn't survive the rebuild?
Spaced-repetition review. Readwise resurfaces old highlights on a schedule designed to help you actually retain them; this build exports highlights to files but doesn't decide when to show you which ones again.
Related tools
Receipt