Second Read

What it is

Second Read saves any text visible on your screen, including text you cannot normally select, and returns it to you on every new tab until you have read it again. The product addresses the gap between saving and re-reading: while many tools store highlights and notes, few make you actually return to them. Second Read closes that gap by putting one passage you chose back in front of you repeatedly until it sticks. It works offline, stores nothing on external servers, and offers multiple ways to capture text including a drag-and-drop box, text selection, Telegram integration, and Kindle highlight sync. The extension runs text recognition on your machine and can be accessed through web search, email digests, or your full library on the web.

Questions from the bench

How does Second Read differ from other read-later tools like Pocket or Readwise?

Most read-later tools store highlights but don't make you return to them. Second Read closes that gap by putting one passage you chose back in front of you repeatedly until it sticks to your brain. Other tools can only read a page's underlying code, so they fail for slides, Kindle Cloud Reader, screenshots, scanned PDFs, and video frames, whereas Second Read captures these by reading from pixels.

What happens to my data when I use Second Read?

Nothing you capture leaves your computer. Every capture is written to your device first. If you sign in, the text you captured, page address and title, whether it was read as text or from pixels, your tags, and your email address are stored. The extension only gets access to one tab when you press the shortcut and loses it when you navigate away.

How do I capture text that I cannot normally select?

You can drag a box around anything you can see on your screen. If the text is selectable, highlight it with your mouse and press the shortcut for the most precise capture. If not, drag a box and Second Read reads it from the pixels using optical character recognition, which takes about a second or two.

Will Second Read ever charge money or add premium features?

No team features, no sharing, no importing from other tools, and no paid tier are planned. If Second Read ever needs money to survive, the founder will announce it on the about page before anything changes.

Can I export my saved passages?

Yes, you can export everything to Markdown or JSON whenever you want without asking. You can also delete your account yourself from settings with no request needed.