Eyes Wide, Reader Mode Everything

Eyes Wide, Reader Mode Everything

If you’re reading this, reading is not dead.

Sublime

Oct 24, 2026

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Sublime just

launched Reader Mode

(save any article/essay/story and read/highlight inside Sublime on a clean, reading-ready slate) and we’re celebrating literary life. Not just in the act of deep reading itself, but in the way that reading makes us better beings. Present, observant, curious, contemplative. Everything is like reading if we are willing to open up and see it, rather than simply look at it.

Eyes wide open, Reader Mode on.

The Sublime Newsletter is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

We partnered with Miami-based artists

Isabel Gonzalez

and

Luna Elortegui

to bring Reader Mode to life.

The “Provençal rosé paradox” is the psychological phenomenon where the same bottle of wine tastes better while overlooking a view on vacation than it does when brought back as a souvenir, sipped in the living room.

It’s not the thing we consume but how, with who, where, and when that influences our perception of it and henceforth the breadth of its effect on us.

Consider a book, poem, or piece of text that moved you.

Something you read and never forgot.

Now recall where you read it. What era of your life were you cycling through? Who recommended it to you? On what couch, camping tent, or subway seat were you curled up in when you lapped up the final sentence like a plate of homemade pasta in Italy?

The pasta will always taste better in Italy.

Where and when we read, matters just as much as what we read.

If you ask what cuts into most people’s reading time nowadays they’ll probably tell you it’s their phone. We’re reading on there all the time—captions, ads, texts, email, these words—but we know that’s not

actual

reading.

We crave the kind of text that reconfigures us but also who has the time? We hope to be like the people that instead of scrolling spend a few minutes here and there reading a couple of lines of an essay they saved or a page or two of a book.

Reading long form text on a smart phone is what

Anjan Katta

would describe as “putting kale next to cocaine.” It’s hard to do something slow on my phone when there is so much pinging, flashing, buzzing, pulling attention elsewhere.

Good text requires sustained focus and the agreement between writer and reader to suspend instant gratification and dopamine addiction for a while, in order for the metaphorical color of a long form text to reveal itself.

There’s tons of discussion now that we are seeing the

end of reading

. Others say

no

. Some credit this “death of reading” to the

resurgence of oral culture

.

When books were invented, humans also thought that it would kill the ways we relate to one another and the world. And in some ways, it did. Evolution requires that the old die off in the process of transformation.

Book of the Month’s “Nobody reads anymore” manifesto made a great timeline depicting how the end of reading has been imminent for centuries, and never fulfilled.

The thing is that true reading is irreplaceable. Not interchangeable with audio or video—the act of engaging with long form written text makes us who we are.

Text is alive because it gives us the room to see for ourselves and see ourselves. We don’t read to find out how the story ends, we read to go through the journey that happens within us as we navigate layered text.

What we consume becomes the fuel for what we create. A writer is a solitary creature, but text is a collective artifact. No creation exists without those who created prior, no thing exists without its references. When we read one thing, we are reading the millions of ideas that came before it.

Reading is not dying, but the ways we read

are

changing. Reading on our computers and phone allows for text to interact. Much like this piece you are reading now, and the

references throughout

.

Much like the way

Sublime’s related ideas

let you save a piece of text and find hundreds of connected wormholes of text.

Reading online allows texts that once sat solitary in their analog chambers to spill into one another, synergize, and create new ideas and texts through these connections.

Es Devlin,

Library of Us

. Sunn Studio. Courtesy of the artist and Faena Art.

Devlin’s installation is a work of art made up of its references. Her research archive becomes a public work of art, showcasing the direct overlap between consumption and creation, and how what we read becomes what we create and who we are.

When we relate to consumption as a creative act—deep reading and the subsequent archiving and sharing of what we read—becomes the gateway to reclaiming technology as a connective force, rather than the echo chamber of isolation it threatens to be.

Technology treats the process of consuming and the process of creating as distinctly different, when the reality is that for our brains, the process of absorbing a book is not all too different from the process of producing one. We are always seeking new connections, combining and recombining old ideas to produce new ones. So why is it that we consume books full of words, but write in an empty Google Doc? Why is the process of consuming so passive, while producing so active? Curation is so deeply under-explored on the Internet in my opinion. It sits right in between consumption and creation and is the perfect bridge between the two, allowing us to actively engage with what we consume to then produce work from this saved knowledge.

It may not be so much about whether we pick up the phone or pick up a book, but how we make it easier for ourselves when we inevitably do pick up the phone, to consume something worth reading vs something that is pre-chewed..

Reader Mode turns anything you save to Sublime into a calm, distraction-free read. Save an essay, settle in, highlight the sentences you want to remember. All in a setting conducive to staying on task.

Try reading this piece in reader mode?

And if you’re feeling the pull toward paper, we partnered with Offprint to turn your Sublime library into a monthly magazine, delivered to your door. Text

Offprint here

, connect your Sublime library when prompted, and assemble your next print issue.

If you’re reading this, reading is not dead. We go by going. We read by reading.

The Sublime Newsletter is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

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