Press Kit

Take & Read turns the great books into a feed. Every passage is quoted word for word from a public-domain edition, and every one opens the whole book at the page it came from.

Fact sheet

App: Take & Read, for iPhone and iPad, with iOS or iPadOS 26 or later
Publisher: Prodromus LLC, prodromus.app
Release: fall 2026, on the App Store
Price: free to download. One in-app purchase, The Library, opens every work in full: $9.99 at launch, a founding price. No subscription, and it works with Family Sharing.
The library: over 200 works of philosophy, theology, poetry and fiction, from Homer to T. S. Eliot, with more than 10,000 passages chosen from them
Where: the US, Canada, New Zealand, Hong Kong, the Philippines and South Africa at launch
Privacy: no account, no ads and no tracking

About Take & Read

Take & Read is for people who are going to scroll anyway. It keeps the ease of a feed and changes what the feed is made of: Augustine in the garden in Milan, Marcus Aurelius at dawn, Seneca on the shortness of life, Milton’s Satan, Pascal, Donne and Dostoevsky. Each passage names its translator and comes with a short note on who is speaking, when, and why it matters.

Every passage is a way into its book. Tap “In context” and the whole work opens at that sentence, highlighted, to read on in a real reader: a table of contents, your place saved in every book, adjustable text size, and light and dark pages.

Readers keep a commonplace book, as readers from Erasmus to Jefferson did: the passages that stay with them and what they write about them, to find again by date, work or theme. It stays on their iPhone or iPad and in their own iCloud. A widget puts a passage on the Home Screen or Lock Screen through the day.

The feed, the commonplace book and the widget are free, along with the pages around every passage, the opening of every work, and six short books in full. The Library opens every work in full, including every work added later.

Worth knowing

No misquotations. Quotations online are often paraphrased or put in the wrong mouth. Every passage in Take & Read is checked by machine, word for word, against the edition it comes from, and the app isn’t built if one doesn’t match.
A feed that leads somewhere. The feed never runs dry, but every so often it invites you to slow down: to stay with a passage you kept, or to pick up the book you were reading where you left off.
The covers. Every work has a cover from the history of art: Benozzo Gozzoli’s fresco of Augustine reading St Paul for the Confessions, Blake for The Pilgrim’s Progress, Doré for Paradise Lost.
The name. Take & Read is named for the words Augustine heard in a garden in Milan in 386, the words that sent him to the book that changed his life: “Take up and read.”

Images

Screenshots at full size, free to use in writing about Take & Read. Select one to open it.

iPhone (1320 × 2868)

The feed: Augustine on hearing a child’s voice say “Take up and read,” from the Confessions, with a note on when and where — The feed

The same passage, highlighted in the whole of the Confessions — In context

The Library: the book being read, and the covers on the Philosophy shelf — The Library

Writing about a passage in the journal — The journal

My Commonplace: kept passages, each with what was written about it — My Commonplace

George Herbert’s “Love (III)” in the reader, with dark pages — Poetry in the reader

iPad (2064 × 2752)

The feed on iPad: Augustine on hearing a child’s voice say “Take up and read,” from the Confessions, with a note on when and where — The feed

The same passage, highlighted in the whole of the Confessions, on iPad — In context

The Library on iPad: the book being read, and the Philosophy, Theology and Poetry shelves — The Library

Writing about a passage in the journal, on iPad — The journal

My Commonplace on iPad: kept passages, each with what was written about it — My Commonplace

The feed on iPad with dark pages — Dark pages

George Herbert’s “Love (III)” in the reader on iPad, with dark pages — Poetry in the reader

Downloads

Every screenshot and the icon (ZIP, 15 MB)
The app icon, 1024 × 1024 (PNG)
The App Store preview, 30 seconds (MP4)

Contact

For interviews or questions, write to hello@prodromus.app.

Take & Read is on Instagram and Threads (@takeandread.app), X (@TakeandRead), Bluesky (@takeandread.bsky.social), Pinterest (takeandreadapp), TikTok (@takeandread) and YouTube (@takeandreadapp), and sends news by email about once a month.