Frequently Asked Questions

🌿 So many reading apps reward speed and quantity, quietly pushing us towards easier, faster reads.

🌱 I wanted to build something different: an app that encourages people to spend time with more challenging texts, wrestle with better ideas, and grow their personal vocabulary along the way.

🌳 The aim is not simply to read more, but to read more deeply.

🍃 This app is designed for people who want offline games and reading tools that strengthen attention, build connections in the brain, and make the quiet work of thinking feel rewarding.

There are two reasons — one practical, one more important.

The practical one: extensive reproduction of text from copyrighted works raises copyright concerns, and photographing pages can easily cross that line.

The more important one: a commonplace book is a pen-and-paper accompaniment to reading, and that tradition exists for a reason. A quote worth keeping is a quote worth remembering — and the best way to remember something is to actively record it, whether by writing or typing it out. Passive recording (a photograph, a screenshot) skips the mental work that makes the quote stick.

Beyond that, the Marginalia section is designed for more than storage. Adding a note about why a quote struck you is an opportunity for PQA analysis — Point, Quote, Analysis — the practice of connecting a passage to an idea in your own words. That process deepens your understanding of the text in a way no photograph can.

Simply to know when I'm being spammed by bots. IP addresses appear in server logs automatically — I don't store them, analyse them, or link them to any user data. They're just a way of spotting unusual automated traffic so I can keep the app running smoothly for real readers.

Nothing. Your book list lives entirely in your browser. The server is never told which books you add, remove, or read. The only server request related to books is an ISBN lookup if you choose to scan a barcode — that query goes to Open Library's public API, and I don't log it.

Nothing. All your stats — words saved, books read, reading analysis, vocabulary progress — are calculated and stored locally in your browser. None of that data is ever sent to the server.

Because not knowing a word is not a weakness — it's an opportunity, and I wanted the app to say that the moment you open it.

Context will carry you through most words most of the time, especially when you're deep in a book and don't want to break the flow. But there's a cost to jumping over words and assuming a meaning. Those assumptions accumulate quietly, and eventually the text becomes harder to follow — not because it got more difficult, but because the foundation has too many gaps. That's often the point where people put the book down, watch a video summary, or read someone else's take instead of finishing it themselves.

Looking a word up properly — definition, etymology, how it sits in the sentence — resolves the uncertainty cleanly. Do it enough times and something shifts: the texts that once felt out of reach start to feel possible. Personally, building this habit gave me the confidence to read older, harder, original sources — the kind of texts I used to assume weren't for me. Getting into that world has been one of the best things I've done.

The home screen is a lookup because that single action, done consistently, is where most of the good things in this app begin.

No. There is no account, no sign-up, no email address required. You open the app and it works. Your data belongs to you and lives on your device — not on a server somewhere waiting to be breached, sold, or deleted when a startup runs out of money.

Your words, books, and notes will be gone. Because everything is stored locally in your browser, clearing site data or switching to a different browser starts you from scratch.

Before you clear your browser, switch devices, or do a phone reset, go to Settings and export your data. You can import it again on any browser or device and pick up exactly where you left off.

Yes, though syncing is manual rather than automatic. Export your data from Settings on one device and import it on another. It takes about ten seconds and keeps everything in sync. Automatic cloud sync would require an account and a server that knows your data — which defeats the whole point.

Yes. Once you have looked up a word, it is saved to your device and available without a connection. All the revision games — Hangman, Flashcards, Multiple Choice, Type It, and Crossword — work fully offline.

Install Sylvarium as a PWA for the best offline experience: on iPhone or iPad, tap Share → Add to Home Screen in Safari; on Android, tap the three-dot menu → Add to Home Screen or Install app in Chrome.

A commonplace book is a personal collection of passages, ideas, and observations gathered while reading — a tradition that stretches back centuries. Readers would copy out quotations that moved or provoked them, add their own reflections, and return to the collection as a record of their intellectual life.

Sylvarium is a digital version of that practice: a place to collect words that stopped you, quotes worth keeping, notes on books, and thoughts in your own words. It is not a social feed or a productivity system — just a quiet record of your reading, built up over time.

Marginalia are the notes written in the margins of a book — underlinings, reactions, questions, arguments with the author. Some of the most interesting marginalia in history are the ones left by readers in library copies of books, a private conversation made accidentally public.

In Sylvarium, the Marginalia section is a per-book space for exactly that: quotes you want to keep, terms from the book's world, and your own notes and reactions. When you finish a book, you can download the whole thing.

Sylva is like the Latin word for forest; -arium denotes a collection or place. A sylvarium is, literally, a forest gathered together.

The name felt right because so much of the internet is designed to do the opposite of what a forest does — to flatten, to narrow, to lock you into a single location with a curated vocabulary of approved ideas. I wanted to build something that pointed the other way: a dense, growing collection of vocabulary, books, and thoughts, accumulated slowly and owned entirely by the person who built it.

A forest grows on its own terms. That felt like the right aspiration.

Bibliomuse is the community reading list section of Sylvarium Words. Readers can browse curated lists by category, create their own, and recommend books from their personal library.

The design is deliberately simple. Books do rise by the number of recommendations they receive, but a recommendation isn't a click — it has to come from someone who has the book in their library and has chosen to put their name to it. There are no anonymous upvotes, no one-tap likes, and no black-box weighting for engagement or promotion. The ranking reflects what real readers have actually read and chosen to pass on.

The inspiration was Jimmy Wales's belief — proven out by Wikipedia — that if you build a system with the right structure and trust the people using it, something genuinely good can grow. Books are too interesting and reading too personal to hand over to an algorithm optimised for engagement. Bibliomuse is an attempt to let readers just talk to each other about books they love.