We Built a Tool for Reading, Not Productivity

By The Arcaneum

Category: Arcaneum Focus Launch

A 2025 benchmark Study by the editorial analytics team at Smartocto, covering more than 30 million articles, found that the average time spent on an online article was 45 seconds. The Nielsen Norman Group analysed over 50,000 Page views and found that web visitors read barely 28 per cent of the words on any page they open, while the actual number is closer to 20 per cent. That's how long an average reader sustains attention on a single screen.

We are not sharing these numbers to alarm you. They simply show the kind of environment in which people have to read today. Instead of asking how short our attention spans have become, we should ask why. This is not about the neurological side of attention, which is a different and still debated topic, but about how the web is designed.

The internet today is designed to encourage engagement rather than deep reading. These two things are not the same thing; in some ways, they sometimes work against each other. In the world of technology, engagement means keeping users on a platform for as long as possible. But real reading is different. It means following an argument from beginning to its conclusion and coming away thinking differently; it requires sustained attention to a single object. The web rewards the first. It barely accommodates the second.

Most reading tools have accepted this. They are built for productivity: speed, capture, throughput, progress dashboard, etc. They treat articles as tasks to complete. The underlying assumption is that reading is a form of information processing, and the goal is to process more of it, faster.

We built Arcaneum Focus because we couldn't find a tool that started from a different premise— that reading is a form of thinking and processing, but Arcaneum Focus's point is not to finish articles but to understand them. Arcaneum Focus is built for understanding and will look quite different from a tool built for throughput.

Arcaneum Focus is a browser extension, free to install from the Chrome Web Store, that works on Chrome, Edge, Brave, Arc or any Chromium-based browser. It doesn't require an account. It stores nothing on a server. Everything you save— highlights, notes, citations, reading queue— stays in your browser, on your machine, because your annotations are yours and they shouldn't require a subscription to remain accessible.

What it does is harder to compress into a sentence, because it's really about restoring a set of reading behaviours that the modern web has quietly made inconvenient. Reader mode strips a page down to its text— no sidebars, no autoplay, no recommended content in the margins competing for the eye. Six colour modes for highlighting, with the option to add tags, so that a passage marked in blue means something different from one marked in yellow, and you can actually find things again. Floating notes that anchor to specific paragraphs rather than floating in a separate sidebar disconnected from the text they refer to. The difference between a marginal note and a Post-it stuck to a book's cover. A built-in Pomodoro timer so that a reading session has a shape and a boundary rather than bleeding into general screen time. Citation generation in APA, MLA, and Chicago formats, one click, right where you're reading. A PDF viewer that works identically to the web reader, so that the tools don't change between file types.

None of these features is, individually, new. What's uncommon is building them together under a single premise: that the reader is not the product. The phrase has become a cliché in tech criticism, but it's worth being precise about what it means here. Hypothesis, one of the more established annotation tools, is built around social and collaborative annotation, which is excellent for certain use cases, particularly pedagogy, and genuinely misses the point for others. Readwise Reader stores your highlights and resurfaces them through a spaced repetition system, which treats memory as the goal of reading rather than as a side effect of understanding. Weava and Digo both have over 300,000 users and are both, by their own description, primarily productivity tools. Zotero, which we admire, is a reference manager that happens to annotate rather than an annotation tool that happens to manage references.

Arcaneum Focus has no social layer. No algorithm deciding what to resurface. No server watching what you read or how long you spend on it. The design choice is quiet, but it matters: reading changes when you know it's being tracked. Not dramatically, but measurably. There's a version of the Hawthorne effect at work when your annotations feed a database that generates insights about your reading patterns. Focus doesn't do that. It just annotates.

We want to be clear about one thing, because we've seen similar announcements slide into overclaiming. Those trends are structural— they're the product of a decade of platform design optimised for maximum engagement at the cost of depth. And Arcaneum Focus is not going to reverse the attention trends. It cannot. What it can do is give tools that don't work against them. There's a difference between solving problems and making it less bad, and we're not pretending otherwise.

The tool is free for students, educators, and researchers. There is no paywall, no freemium tier with a locked feature behind it, no email required. A commercial license is available for workplaces, and that's how the tool sustains itself. The privacy policy is readable not in the sense that all privacy policies are technically readable, but in the sense that it says what it means. The code does exactly what the extension description says it does and nothing else. We've also been transparent about one thing that's unusual to admit on a product launch page: Chrome sometimes shows a "Proceed with caution" warning for extensions from new publishers with no review history. Focus is on. We have no track record on the extension store yet. If that gives you pause, we'd rather tell you plainly than bury the detail in an FAQ. Read the privacy policy. If you're comfortable, install it. If you're not, wait until the reviews accumulate. We are not in a hurry.

The last thing worth saying is about why this came from us, specifically. The Arcaneum exists because we thought there was a gap between how ideas deserve to be read and how the web currently lets you read them. The articles we publish are built for people who want to sit with something, not scan it, not capture it for later, not add it to a queue, but actually read it. That's a thin slice of how people currently use the web. We know that. But the people who want to read that way are real, and they deserve tools that treat reading as the point rather than as the precursor to something else. Arcaneum Focus is what we built for them.