Living Verses

Living Verses is a place to keep the passages that stay with you. Photograph something from whatever you are reading. Write what it is above it, and what you make of it below. Gather the pieces into collections. Arrange them on a board until the arrangement means something. Keep the result.

It borrows an old habit — reading something worth keeping, copying it out, and writing down what you made of it. People have done that for centuries: a private collection of passages, gathered slowly, rearranged until the order says something the individual pieces did not. Living Verses is that, for a phone.

There is no feed. Nothing you write is shown to anyone unless you deliberately publish it, and even then it is a frozen copy at a fixed address rather than a post in someone’s timeline.

There are no likes, no view counts, no follower numbers and no notifications competing for your attention. A published page carries no analytics and nothing that watches the person reading it. These absences are the point, not features we have not got round to.

Your clippings are stored on your own device first. The app opens instantly, works on a train with no signal, and does not need our servers to show you your own writing. Syncing across devices is the paid part; having your archive is not.

That ordering matters. If this service disappeared tomorrow, what you have written would still be on your device, and you could export it to PDF and walk away with it.

Living Verses is made by one person in the UK. It is small on purpose — no investors expecting growth at any cost, and no reason to turn your reading habits into someone else’s advertising inventory. It is paid for by the people who use it, which is the simplest arrangement there is.

If you have a question, a problem, or a thought about what it should become, please write to me. A real person reads it.