Fact Snack

**The whole book is already on your device.** Reading it, the daily page, the questions, the marathon and your streak need no connection at all, on a plane or down a tunnel or with the router unplugged. Duels, the leaderboards, choosing your display name and moving to another device use Hearth Software's online service, and those do need one. **One page a day, from a book somebody actually wrote.** Fact Snack is the whole of *Fact Snack: 365 Daily Bites of Knowledge* by Nir Nagar, in print at 835 pages. Why some rivers boil. How penicillin was found by accident and nearly lost again. What the Aztecs thought they were doing. Why the ancient Olympics were held naked. Three hundred and sixty five of them. You get one each morning. Not a feed, not a queue that grows while you sleep, not a thing you can fall behind on. One page, four or five minutes, and it is yours whether or not you answer a single question about it. The page is drawn from what you have not read, so nothing repeats while anything is left. If one does not appeal, you can swap it once a week, and the page you turned down goes back in the pool instead of counting as read. **The next morning, three questions.** Not about trivia in general. About the page you read yesterday, while you can still feel whether it stuck. Get two right and the day is kept and your streak grows. Miss it and the streak resets, and that is all that happens. The page, your answers, your marathon score and everything you have read stay exactly as they were. Nothing in this app is ever taken away for getting something wrong, and nothing is locked behind getting something right. Miss a day because life happened and the app spends a monthly freeze on your behalf without being asked. **Find out how much of it you actually know.** The marathon asks as many questions as you can take, twenty seconds each, from anywhere in the book. There are 1,830 of them. Every question counts once per player, for life. That one rule is what makes the score mean anything: the highest number anybody can ever reach is the whole book, nobody can farm the same easy questions twice, and a score of 400 means four hundred distinct things you knew under a clock. A wrong answer does not end the run. Only leaving does. Questions you get wrong can be sent to a queue, and the app hands those pages back to you one a day, ahead of a fresh draw, while you still remember missing them. **Play someone.** Send a friend a six-character code. You both get the same page on the same timer, then the same five questions on the buzzer. Hit the buzzer first and the question is yours, in ten seconds instead of twenty. Long enough to confirm what you already knew, not long enough to reason your way to it. Miss it and it passes to them for two points instead of one, and so does running the clock down, because otherwise the winning move is to grab every question and stall. You do not have to be online at the same moment. Play your half whenever you like and the result waits for both of you. **Or two of you, one device, no code at all.** Put the tablet flat on the table between you. There is a buzzer at each edge and the far one is upside down, the right way up for the person it belongs to. Each player gets a colour, a lamp and a sound. On a computer you sit side by side and the buzzers are the two shift keys. **Two leaderboards, and neither can be gamed.** One for how much of the book you know, which is the marathon score, and cannot be padded because every question is spent the first time you see it. One for duels, rated, so beating a stronger player counts for more than beating a weaker one, and playing a great many duels counts for nothing on its own. You also get your own last five runs, with the date, the score and your average seconds a question, so you can see whether you are getting faster or just getting luckier. **What it does not do.** - No advertising. Nothing flashes, nothing interrupts, nothing is sold to you between one paragraph and the next. - No account, no email address, no password, nothing to verify. - No tracking and no analytics. - No subscription. Nothing renews and nothing expires. - Your name is drawn from words we wrote, so there is nothing to type and nothing anybody can put on a shared leaderboard that we did not write. **What you pay, and when.** The first ten pages are free, and they are the same ten for everybody, so nobody gets a worse trial than anybody else. After that the rest of the book is one payment, once, and it stays open. Moving to a new computer takes a code. Your streak, your marathon score and everything you have read come with you. Light and dark, following your system. The whole book is already on your device from the moment you install it, so nothing downloads and nothing waits. Every page comes from the printed edition, which runs to 835 pages and is available separately.