We've lost touch
with what made us.
Have you felt it too? The intuition that there's something you need, hidden away in Homer, the Bible or Shakespeare? The boredom and confusion when you give them a go? The resignation when you finally give up and go back to scroll a feed or listen to a low-calorie podcast?
The classics are the books that made the West. They have given joy, meaning and guidance to millions of people for thousands of years. They were also old when your great-grandparents read them. And their great-grandparents too. But today, this transmission mechanism is broken. The books remain as interesting as they have always been, but we struggle to access their richness.
We're force-fed them in schools, often by dispassionate, disdainful teachers. We come to share those sentiments. We look up a summary instead of reading, and come away thinking they are flat. We try again, years later, but get stuck on language we don't quite understand. We forget what page we got to. We forget what Rodya has been up to on page 62 and miss that Rodya, Rodion and Raskolnikov are Russian versions of the same name. We fail to see the treasures that await us if we read the book with the right angle.
This is not a small loss. These treasure troves are incredibly rich and incredibly dense. Each paragraph is dense with knowledge, suspense and fun. When you finish one, you think differently. When a generation finishes them, a civilization thinks differently.
Tinct, a new way to read.
Tinct is a new way to read, understand and fall in love with the Classics. It's built for all of us who want to engage them, argue with them, wrestle them, but have struggled with other means. Here's what reading with Tinct is like:
You open the Odyssey, on your phone, tablet, or e-reader.
You read it in the translator’s English — the work of a person who has spent years on this text. When a passage gets dense, you open a modern, AI-assisted translation alongside it, or you just read the modern translation in the first place.
You always have an AI-companion that knows where you are in the book with you. You can ask it anything — is Odysseus telling the truth, what was Homer trying to warn against with the nymphs, why were the suitors allowed to stay around for so long — and get instant, high-quality answers.
You pick up the phone on the commute. The audiobook picks up exactly where you stopped reading last night.
You forget who Menelaus is. You tap "Casts", the character tracker, and get a quick overview, only of what you've read about him so far.
You finish a chapter. Your thoughts, highlights and chats are stored to a "Feed" that grows as you do. You will never have to rely on your memory to remember which Proverbs you've read and what you thought about them.
Tinct offers everything Audible and Kindle do — and goes further with an AI companion that knows your page, a modern comparison translation for when it gets dense, and a synced audiobook, at a fraction of the price. Reading is free forever. The premium features (AI companion, Casts, Feed, Synced audiobook) are available for the full library for just 3 dollars/month and free for the first month. Less than a cup of coffee, much less than a single e-book or audiobook or any book-related subscription.