About Surfc
You've highlighted hundreds of passages. You can't find them when you need them. Surfc is the private idea index that gets you from a marked book to a searchable thought — without having to remember which book it was in.
Most reading tools file your highlights under the book. Surfc files them under the idea — so when you go looking for what you read about authority, or memory, or trust, the book follows the thought.
Your notes and AI insights are protected with end-to-end encryption at rest, including synced storage.
Why I built Surfc
Reading is a strange kind of investment. You pour years into it, hundreds of books, thousands of hours, and the returns are real but almost impossible to point to. I can feel the books that changed me. I cannot always name them. Something I read years ago rearranged how I think about a thing I now treat as obvious, and if you asked me which book, which chapter, which sentence did the work, I would have nothing for you. The change took. The receipt did not.
That bothers me more than it probably should. You like to believe you remember what shaped you. You don't, not really. You remember a vague glow around a title, a feeling that a book mattered, and almost none of the substance that did the actual shaping. The insight was there, it did its work, and then it slipped quietly out the back while you were busy starting the next book.
And that is the generous version, the one where the idea at least left a mark. The everyday frustration is smaller and more annoying than that. I know I read something good about a topic. I go looking for it. It isn't anywhere. It is underlined in a book on a shelf I haven't opened in three years, or scribbled in a margin I will never find again, or highlighted in some app that swallowed it whole. Hundreds of passages I cared enough to mark, and not one of them within reach the moment I actually need it.
The part nobody wants to admit is that highlighting is not keeping. Marking a passage feels like saving it. It isn't. It is the reading equivalent of photographing a meal instead of tasting it, a gesture toward memory that quietly stands in for the memory itself. A highlight you cannot retrieve, cannot connect, cannot argue with months later is just ink on a page (which, when you say it plainly like that, is a slightly depressing thing to have done a thousand times).
So I built the thing I actually wanted. Not a place to dump highlights. An index. Somewhere a note I make today finds the note I made years ago, where the ideas I keep circling back to surface on their own instead of waiting for me to remember they exist. And, this is the part that matters most to me, somewhere I can see not just what I nodded along with but what I argued against. The agreements are easy. The tensions are where the change actually happens. You don't really take an idea on board until you have wrestled with it, and I wanted a record of the wrestling, not just the verdict it ended on.
That is Surfc. It started, as a lot of this did, with Adler. I was finishing How to Read a Book and I had this sinking feeling that everything I was learning, every insight the book had set off in me, would start eroding the second I slid it back onto the shelf. I did not want a reading app. I have plenty of those. I wanted a private record of the person I am becoming through the things I have read and the thoughts I have kept, mine to hold, and worth more the longer I keep at it.
I built it for myself first, and I will not pretend otherwise. But it turns out I am not the only one. There are other people who read to think, who argue in the margins, who want a lifetime of reading to compound instead of scatter across shelves and apps and forgotten highlights. If that is you, then somewhere along the way I started building it for you too.
— Deji Dipeolu
A commonplace book, reborn as a living index — searchable, connected, and yours.
A private, offline-first idea index for serious readers.