I had a frustrating experience over Christmas: an online film rental service took my money, and then refused to show me the film I’d paid for because their internal licensing system was broken. I’m not naming them because I like them, they refunded me, and they’ve since fixed the problem, but it did send me scurrying across the internet for other sources. Eventually I watched it on another service I’d rather not have given money to, but I did it legally, for those keeping score. (It was Nic Roeg’s The Man Who Fell to Earth by the way. Perhaps it’s in the nature of the internet. Just waves in space…)

This little episode probably predisposed me towards the creators of Addr, a new e-reading app for iPad, with intentionally limited features and a strong focus on sharing and annotation. Addr was built by two French brothers who state on their blog: “We don’t think anything centralised is good for the economy, we will never ever use stolen money – neither from governments nor central banks. All our financial sheets and transactions are to be made in Bitcoin.” This anti-centralisation doctrine extends to recommending not only the Project Gutenberg free ebook site as a source for their users, but also the more legally dubious Library Genesis, a Russian repository of millions of pirated books.

Addr allows users to read anything they can get their hands on, make notes in the margins using simple gestures, and share those notes with their friends. It’s beautifully designed, relatively easy to use, and whether you agree with the creators’ politics or not, it does highlight the sad situation we still find ourselves in 2015, where sharing books and our experience of them is still harder electronically than on paper, despite the networking of pretty much everything else.