381 words · 4 extracts anchored
Most people who try to read on the internet build a pile. Pocket, a downloads folder, a dozen tabs named "read later". A pile has no next item. It only has guilt.
A reading pile is a graveyard. A reading queue is a promise that the next thing you see is the most important unread span you have.
Priority is not importance in the abstract. It is a ranking of what should surface next, on a 0-100 scale where lower numbers float to the top.
The unit of work is not the document. It is a span. You open a source, you read until something is worth keeping, you extract that span, and you go back to the queue. The rest of the document waits at the priority you left it.
Extracts are not notes. An extract is a span you might want to remember; a note is the sentence you would say if you had to explain it tomorrow.
That distinction is the whole product. Highlights are cheap and they rot. A note is a claim in your own words, and only claims should become questions. If a system turns a PDF into flashcards without a note in between, it is testing the author's phrasing, not your understanding.
Anchoring is how an extract stays honest. Store the exact quote plus a short prefix and suffix and the character offsets in the normalized markdown. When the source moves, the highlight should try to find itself again: exact quote, then prefix and suffix, then fuzzy. If all three fail, it is orphaned, not deleted.
Orphans are not a failure of the user. They are a failure of the file to stay still. Detach them when you mean to keep the text without the location. Re-anchor them when you have a new source. Do not silently drop them.
A notebook is not a folder that owns files. It is a saved collection of references. The same source, the same note, and the same activity can appear in many notebooks, because membership is a join table, not a parent pointer.
Read a little. Extract a little. Distill. Then let the queue decide what is next. That is incremental reading. Everything else is a to-read list with better typography.