The way this website works is fairly simple:
We aim to remember as much as possible what we read, with as little effort as possible. Once you finish a book, you search for it on readcollect under add cards. The website will show you flashcards made by other users, ranked by how many other users have put that flashcard into their deck. The more other people select a card to go into their deck, the more important it likely is to be. You can go through all the cards and select each one that you think is important to remember about the book. If you think an essential card is missing, you can add it. You add them to a deck of your choice or make a new deck. Some people like to make a separate deck for each book they read, some people like to group books into topics, and some people like to have several decks per book. Whatever suits you best.
Then the remembering starts.
When you go to your decks, you will get an overview of all your decks. It will show you for each deck how many cards are due. This means they need to be reviewed for optimal remembering. All cards in your decks have a due date, that determines when they need to be practiced. These due dates are optimally spaced to remember the cards. When you add a card to a deck, the due date is set to that specific day, so you can practice your decks immediately. Ideally, you check in every day to practice the cards that are due, but the system will just remember all the cards that are due, so checking in less frequently also works (just a tiny bit less efficiently).
When you click practice on a deck, you will go through all the cards that are due. The website shows you a card, you think of the answer, and click the button “show answer”. The website will display the back of the card and then it is for you to decide if you have to practice the card again that day (a.k.a incorrect), or if it was “hard“, “good” or “easy“. The button you click will determine the next due date for that specific card. In principle ReadCollect does the math for you, but here is the formula that is used:
- Again: the card will be put at the end of the list you are practicing, so it will show up again this session. After closing the session, the card’s due date is set to tomorrow.
- Hard: The next due date will be set to the distance between the last practice and the current due date times 1.5, rounded to a whole day.
- Good: The next due date will be set to the distance between the last practice and the current due date times 2.
- Easy: The next due date will be set to the distance between the last practice and the current due date times 3.
This spacing guarantees that you remember as much as possible what you have read in the book, with minimum effort. Because we are treating information that has just been processed by reading a book, the spacing is set a little differently than other spaced repetition tools like Anki, in order to save time.
Should a card be “gone” too far into the future for your liking, you can always go to “inspect deck”, find the specific card and click the “reset” button. This will reset the last practiced and due date to the current date, so you can start the process from scratch.