Incremental Reading: How to Read Multiple Books at Once and Actually Remember Them | Chapterly Blog
Incremental Reading: How to Read Multiple Books at Once and Actually Remember Them Quick Answer: Incremental reading is a structured method for reading multiple texts simultaneously by rotating between them in short sessions and using spaced repetition to review extracted highlights. Unlike casual book-juggling, incremental reading schedules your reading queue the same way flashcard apps schedule your reviews: material you find harder or more important surfaces more frequently. The result is better comprehension (through interleaving) and better retention (through spaced review) than reading books one at a time. In 1999, a Polish researcher named Piotr Wozniak had a problem. He was the inventor of SuperMemo, the first spaced repetition software, and he had spent two decades optimizing how humans memorize discrete facts. But he kept running into a bottleneck: the facts had to come from somewhere, and that somewhere was usually a book or article he did not have time to read. His solution was to feed entire articles into SuperMemo, break them into smaller pieces over time, and let the spaced repetition algorithm schedule both his reading and his review. He called the technique "incremental reading," and it fundamentally changed how he processed information. The method never went mainstream....