Colophon · No. 01

One idea per screen.
One book at a time.

Redr distills technical books into scroll-snap slide decks — title, chapter, concept, vocabulary, takeaway — so each screen carries one thought you can actually hold in your head.

§ 01 · The trouble with long-form

The problem with a 600-page book.

You bought it. You meant to read it. Three weeks later you're on page 42 and you couldn't name the last chapter's thesis if someone paid you. The book isn't the problem — the delivery is. Long-form prose asks your working memory to juggle definitions, examples, and arguments simultaneously, then never tells you when to pause and consolidate.

§ 02 · What the research says

Five findings, cited honestly.

Working memory is small

Cowan's widely-cited review puts working-memory capacity at roughly four independent items — not the famous “7 ± 2” from Miller's 1956 paper, which counted rehearsed chunks. When a paragraph throws six new terms at you, two are already gone.

Cowan (2001), Behavioral and Brain Sciences

Segmenting helps, measurably

Mayer's segmenting principle: learners who receive a multimedia lesson broken into learner-paced chunks outperform those who get it as one continuous stream on transfer tests, with a median effect size around d ≈ 0.79 across ten controlled experiments.

Mayer & Pilegard, Cambridge Handbook of Multimedia Learning (2nd ed., 2014)

Spacing beats cramming

A meta-analysis of 317 experiments found distributed practice produced better recall than massed practice in 259 of 271 comparisons. The bookmark + position-saving in every Redr deck exists for one reason: come back tomorrow, not in one marathon session.

Cepeda, Pashler, Vul, Wixted & Rohrer (2006), Psychological Bulletin

You forget fast — unless you revisit

Ebbinghaus's 1885 forgetting curve has been replicated with modern controls: retention drops steeply within hours and days without review. The exact percentages depend on what you learned, but the shape — fast early loss, gradual flattening — is real.

Murre & Dros (2015), PLOS ONE — replicating Ebbinghaus (1885)

Retrieval beats rereading

Roediger and Karpicke had students study a passage, then either restudy it or take a recall test. One week later, the testing group remembered ~61 %; the rereading group ~40 %. The vocab slides are flashcards by design, not decoration.

Roediger & Karpicke (2006), Psychological Science

§ 03 · How Redr applies all this

Segmenting: Each slide holds exactly one concept. You set the pace.
Resume anywhere: Position saves to the URL hash and localStorage. Close the tab, come back tomorrow — the deck reopens where you left off.
Vocab as flashcards: Key terms get their own slides, four at a time — sized for the working-memory limit, not the page.
Takeaways for recall: Every book closes with the handful of ideas worth carrying out. Quiz yourself before you read them.

§ 04 · What it isn't

Redr isn't a substitute for the book. Some books deserve every page. But most technical books carry maybe twenty load-bearing ideas, surrounded by examples, anecdotes, and recap. A slide deck keeps the load-bearing parts in front of you and lets the prose wait for the chapters where you actually want it.

Think of it as the index your future self wished the author had written — one screen per idea, one tap to the next.