The library
A growing full-text library read in-app, chapter by chapter, with bookmarks and progress. A couple of books are free to read in full; the rest come with Folio, the premium tier.
Measured in readers
The Daily Canon
One work of literature a day, drawn from a growing canon that reaches back roughly four millennia.
The app, counted
- 18,953downloadsiOS and the web
- 18,041works finishedlogged by readers
- 20,086blurbs readthe writing behind the work
- 25,076saved to a listkept for later
- 242quotes sharedcards made in the app
The noise, and what survives it
There has never been more writing, and there has never been less time to sort it. A feed is not built to hand you a good book. It is built to hand you the next one, and it is extremely good at that. What reaches you is not really a recommendation. It is a volume problem wearing the costume of taste.
None of which is an argument against new books. The app carries hundreds of works published this century, Marilynne Robinson and Joyce Carol Oates and Kazuo Ishiguro among them, and putting living writers in front of readers is one of the better parts of running it.
It is an argument about what lasts. Everything being written now is standing on something older, whether it admits it or not, and the books underneath have already been through the one test nobody can rig. Not prestige. Not a prize. Not a hundred thousand five-star ratings, which can be arranged by lunchtime. Time.
Calvino had the cleanest test of a classic: it is a book you never hear anyone say they are reading, only rereading.
Why I built it
I have always read. I read Theoretical Physics at Imperial and I have built software ever since, and the two have never felt like opposite ends of anything to me. If I am not at work or out with the dog, I am reading. Often I am reading while out with the dog, because Japhy covers a lot of ground and an audiobook covers a lot of pages.
Somewhere in the middle of working through the canon I wanted to know where I actually was in it. What I had finished, what I had abandoned and been quietly relieved about, what I kept meaning to start and never did. Nothing I could find held that in a shape I liked, so I built something that did.
I did not set out to make a product. I set out to stop losing track of my own reading.
What I had not expected was how much the daily shape of it changed the reading itself. One work, today, chosen and waiting. Not a library to conquer, not a list with a number at the bottom that only ever goes up. Just the next thing, and the small pleasure of turning up for it.
That turned out not to be a private taste. It stopped being a personal tool fairly quickly.
It is not just mine any more
There is a small team behind it now: readers who write for the app, and developers who build it. The writing is the part I am most protective of. Every work arrives with a blurb and an extract chosen by somebody who has actually read the thing, which is slower than the alternative and is rather the point of it.
The part I watch is quieter than the App Store. Which books people finish. Which ones they abandon, and where. Which half-forgotten title suddenly finds a run of readers because it landed on a day that gave them a reason to start it. You cannot design that feeling into an app. You can only build the calendar and wait to see whether it happens, and it does.
There is more coming. The book club is the one I am most looking forward to: the same work, the same weeks, somewhere to argue about it. Reading is mostly solitary and mostly better for it. Not always.
On the App Store
4.8 on the App Store
Featured by Apple
I open this app every morning instead of the usual social media doomscrolling, and I actually look forward to it. The simplicity and beauty make it so peaceful. We need more pockets of peace like this.
It's like they made it just for me. All the best books in a beautiful UI, and the Tolstoy calendar is a great touch. I messaged the team in-app and they added three books for me the same day. Amazing!
Genuinely so well crafted. The classics are well picked, the app is gorgeous, and there are so many hidden little features to discover, half of them literary references. You can tell so much care went into this hidden gem.
I thought I was fairly well-read until this app started surfacing names I'd never encountered. That mix of the familiar and the unknown keeps me opening it every day.
This app is clearly made by people who care about the product rather than people just trying to make a buck. Everything about it brightens my day.
This app is like joining a fantastic book club. I wish I had found it sooner.
The number one app for classical literature. Beautifully designed, with a refined, knowledgeable, and broad selection of works.
This app is reintroducing me to all of the great authors and ideas that we superficially learned in school. It is a dose of daily wisdom and deep thinking and I adore it.
Truly, this is my favorite app. I love watching new things being added all the time, you are all making something wonderful. My favorite part is probably the Immersions.
A great addition to one's daily routine. I learn about new works, quotes, and vocabulary each day. It cultivates knowledge a little bit at a time.
Today, in the app
Today’s work.
Read live from the canon. Tomorrow it is a different work.
19 September 2026
Keats Writes To Autumn
To Autumn1820
- Poem
- English
“Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness, close bosom-friend of the maturing sun.”
Read the blurb in the app →What it looks like · drag
1 / 10
One day, one work
You open the app and it shows you one work of literature for today. Tomorrow, a different one. Novels, poems, short stories, essays, plays, philosophy. The only criterion for inclusion is the one above: enough readers have come back to it, for long enough, that it is still here.
The inspiration was Tolstoy's A Calendar of Wisdom. Late in life he compiled quotes and reflections from everything he had read, one page for every day of the year. You turn to today's date and find a handful of ideas arranged around a theme. Some of it is questionable; most of it is very good. I loved the quotidian nature of it, the way it turned reading into a ritual rather than an ambition.
The Daily Canon points that idea at whole works rather than quotations. Each day you meet a title. Sometimes familiar, sometimes long-intended, often completely new. When something catches you, you save it. When you have read it, you mark it done. The daily rhythm turns reading from an aspiration into a practice: modest enough to keep, meaningful enough to compound.
The list was argued into existence
Hundreds of hours went into cross-referencing the great literary lists of the Western and Eastern traditions: the Modern Library's hundred, Harold Bloom's Western Canon, LibraryThing's aggregated rankings, and the heated and occasionally unhinged debates of r/classicliterature and r/TrueLit. A work appearing on one list and nowhere else was treated with suspicion. A work appearing on every list was treated with more, because consensus can be a symptom of laziness as easily as of truth.
Every inclusion is also an exclusion, and a calendar makes that calculus merciless. Shakespeare alone could justify a third of it: King Lear takes one place, Hamlet another, and the rest must yield so that Sophocles and Ibsen and Woolf can breathe. Dickens wrote a dozen masterpieces and gets three, because Tolstoy and Austen and Hugo are waiting. Plath loses Daddy so she can gain The Bell Jar, because Ariel already holds the poetry and the novel does something the poem cannot.
The constraint is the point. Without it the exercise is a catalogue. With it, every work has to earn its place against four thousand years of human expression.
Why these dates
Works arrive on days that carry meaning. Hamlet on Shakespeare's birthday. Ulysses on Bloomsday. Dracula at Halloween. Wuthering Heights on Valentine's Day, because love should always be a little unhinged. In Search of Lost Time on the 29th of February, because what better day for a book consumed with the moments that happen in between things. The calendar reaches well beyond the Western tradition, to Diwali, Nowruz, Vesak and the lunar new year.
These alignments are not decorative. They root the reading in something larger than the text. Where no birthday or occasion fits, a work is placed in the season that suits it, so the rhythm of the year shapes the rhythm of the reading. Each reader walks their own sequence, so the same book finds one person in October and another in March. Seventeen feasts are fixed and shared by everyone, and those are the days the whole readership turns the same page.
Making the books feel like themselves
Once the app worked I could not leave it alone. The engineer wanted features; the reader wanted atmosphere. So I started building visual environments tuned to particular works. They are just for fun, a way to feel a book as well as read about it, and they took an absurd amount of work.
More than a hundred of these now, and counting.
A map of where you have been
The reading list was obvious: save what interests you, check off what you finish. The timeline is the part I am pleased with. It opens on today and scrolls downward through everything you have read, each book a vertical spine as long as the days you spent inside it. A fortnight with Dostoevsky is a tall column. A Chekhov story read on the bus is a notch.
Time is the axis rather than page count, which means the shape of the thing is the shape of your attention, not of the books. Over a year it becomes a map of where you have been and a provocation about where you have not. Alongside it a tier system counts what you have finished, and every work counts equally, whether it is a three-line poem or Proust's three thousand pages.
What it does
Your own day
Every reader gets their own assignment, scored against a table of work-and-occasion pairings rather than handed the same page as everyone else. It is the part of the app I would show another engineer first.
Ten languages
The reading experience and the app's own chrome in ten languages, translated offline and served as static files. No runtime translation API, no rate limit, and guests get it too.
Bloomy
A literary companion built on Claude, for talking through a work, chasing a theme, or asking what to read next. Bloomy is genderless, and labelled as AI wherever it appears.
Reading guides
Hand-written companions for the books that defeat people. How to read Finnegans Wake. Where to stand in the Critique of Pure Reason. What to skip in Clarissa and what you will regret skipping.
Immersions
One work, held for days, read alone or with a cohort. A Chekhov story each morning for ten mornings; a Dickinson poem a day for three weeks. Dozens more behind Folio.
My Canon
Your own ranking of everything you have read, dragged into the order you actually believe.
Streaks and laurels
Consecutive days of reading, freezes for when life happens, and laurels for finishing a path. There is no leaderboard: rank against other readers is the one number the app refuses to show.
The Daily Canon is now a real app
Apple made it App of the Day in July, which was a lovely thing to wake up to, and it happened because of what the rest of this section is about.
Until recently the app was a website in a jacket. It looked the part and it worked, but it was always asking permission from a browser it could not see, and it showed: a beat of delay opening a page, a scroll that never quite gripped, nothing at all without a signal.
It has been rebuilt from nothing in Swift, the language iPhones actually speak. Everything below follows from that. The app is faster because it is no longer pretending, and for the first time it works when your phone does not.
It works with no signal
Download a book and it is yours on the plane, in the tunnel, up the mountain. Your reading, your highlights and your place in the text all live on the phone now and catch up with the server later.
Midnight turns over offline
Tomorrow is worked out in advance and kept on the device, so the new day arrives at midnight whether or not there is any signal to fetch it with.
Every work has a painted background
Four hundred and thirty six hand made backdrops, one per work, drawn to the book rather than picked from a set. The whale, the moor, the river, the tower.
Widgets and a reading timer
Today's work on your home screen and lock screen, and a live timer on the Dynamic Island while you read.
Reading days in your calendar
Join an immersion and its days can go straight into your own calendar, so a twelve day read shows up beside everything else you have promised to do.
Ten languages, properly
Not just the works. The whole app now speaks all ten, down to the buttons.
New books arrive on their own
Newly added works and writing now reach the app the day they are finished, with no update to install.
Coming soon
Two of these are nearly here. Both are Folio, and both have been the thing I most wanted the app to do since long before it could.
The Doorman
Name the apps that eat your evening and The Daily Canon will stand at the door of each one. Open it and today's work is offered first, with an honest way past if you really do need to be in there. Doom scrolling out, close reading in.
Ambience
The weather a book was written in, to read it under. A storm for Lear and The Tempest, the open sea for Moby-Dick, snow going past the window for Anna Karenina, a hearth for A Christmas Carol. It knows which book you are holding, and it keeps playing when you put the phone down.
And a great many small repairs, most of which you will never notice, which is rather the point of them.
How it is built
FrameworkNext.js 15, App Router, TypeScript
DatabaseSupabase Postgres with row-level security
CacheNext.js Data Cache, tag-based invalidation
AIAnthropic Claude, Bloomy and reading summaries
PaymentsRevenueCat on iOS, Stripe on the web
PushApple Push Notification Service, hourly cron
iOSNative SwiftUI, Swift 6, iOS 26. Offline-first on GRDB and SQLite, syncing through a queue
WebPWA service worker, offline-capable
TypeCrimson Text, Spectral, Hanken Grotesk
What it is for
The Daily Canon is not a productivity tool and it is not a gamification engine. There is no leaderboard, and rank against other readers is the one number it refuses to show you. It is a daily encounter with something that has already earned its place.
If you used to read and want a way back, it is a low-friction place to start. If you are already deep in the canon, it is a way to find the gaps you did not know you had. If you have never read much at all, it is as good a map as I know how to draw.
You will not read everything. But you will read enough to recognise the silence where the rest belongs.