· Distill
▲ DISTILL · BETA
AnyBook · Paper · Article · Report

Six c a r d s So you know if the book deserves your week,
the paper deserves your afternoon,
the field deserves your year.

We distill knowledge into 6 cards — from the long, into the memorable and playful.

$3.99 — Founding price
Only for the first 100 orders
— We excel at
  • Non-fiction books (idea · business · science)
  • Academic papers (arXiv · Nature · NEJM)
  • Long essays (Substack · Paul Graham)
  • Industry reports (McKinsey · BCG · whitepapers)
  • Frameworks (7 Habits · Atomic Habits style)
— The Alchemist's Lab

Not sure if it fits?
Try the experimental lab.

For everything else we don't yet excel at — drop it here. We'll experiment. Some come out brilliant. Some don't.

  • 📰 Investigative journalism
  • 📋 Lecture transcripts
  • 📑 White papers · policy briefs
  • ✉ Long newsletters · Substack
  • ✿ Anything you're curious about
⚗ Results may vary · same $3.99 · refund if it doesn't land
— Browse by topic

What's been on people's minds

Stuck on what to distill? Here are six fields we're sharpest in — pick one, or upload anything else.

How it works

Four steps. Often within hours.

01

Send your source

An arXiv link, a book title, an article URL, or a PDF. One paragraph of context if it helps.

02

Pay $3.99

Or claim your first-paper-free credit. Secure Stripe checkout.

03

We craft your cards

Read · distill · design · review. Most orders delivered same day. Worst case: under 24 hours.

04

Delivered

Private LOOMUS-style page + 6 cards as PNGs. Yours to keep, share, post.

What you'll receive

The LOOMUS standard, applied to your source

Every distillation is built in this same editorial style — typography, structure, restraint.

— Feed the flask

Load your source into the apparatus

Each bay lights up when filled. When the panel is ready, send it down.

01 Specimen · file
Drop a file · or click
PDF · DOCX · TXT · MD · EPUB · ≤ 25 MB
02 Specimen · link or title
03 Notes · optional
04 Return address · email

Secure Stripe checkout · cards land in your inbox in hours.

— Why 6 cards

Three reasons. Three 30-second games.

Each one a tiny experiment on yourself — and a paper that proves it.

01 · Memory

Your working memory is tiny.

10 words appear for 3 seconds — how many will you keep?
…how many do you still remember?
Most people hold 3–4 items.
A 300-page book has 50,000+.
6 cards is what fits.

Vogel, E. K. & Machizawa, M. G. (2004). Neural activity predicts individual differences in visual working memory capacity. Nature, 428(6984), 748–751.

nature Vol 428 · 2004
02 · Visual

Pictures stick. Paragraphs don't.

vs
The compound effect is the principle of reaping huge rewards from small, seemingly insignificant actions. Success is not magical or mysterious. It is the natural result of consistently applying the fundamentals over time.
time → growth
Humans correctly remembered 90% of 2,500 pictures.
Same brain, text: ~10%.
Cards carry both.

Brady, T. F., Konkle, T., Alvarez, G. A., & Oliva, A. (2008). Visual long-term memory has a massive storage capacity for object details. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 105(38), 14325–14329.

MIT Harvard PNAS
03 · Structure

Chunks beat lists.

Soup F B I C I A I B M U S A N A S A U N M I T
Chunks FBI · CIA · IBM · USA · NASA · UN · MIT
Same 21 letters. One is forgotten in seconds.
The other lives in long-term memory.
6 cards is your scaffold.

Miller, G. A. (1956). The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two: Some Limits on Our Capacity for Processing Information. Psychological Review, 63(2), 81–97. — Miller's chunking insight: we expand capacity not by holding more bits, but by packing them into bigger meaning-units.

Harvard Psychological Review
— A 30-second game

How much should a book shrink?

Drag the dot. There's a sweet spot — we live there.

300 pages · the whole thing
30-page summary · still long
6 cards · the sweet spot ✦
"
1 line · too thin
300pg 30pg 6 cards (us) 1 line