Every claim, a source

Learn anything.
And actually remember it.

Type any topic. Nodebook compiles a lesson from real, linked sources, then makes you recall it days later, so it's still there in a month.

  • 3 free lessons a month
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Why nothing escapes a black holeTeach me
Beginner·Everyday life
02The event horizonDefinitional
PlainExampleMetaphorVisual

What would it actually take to escape a black hole?

Cross this boundary and getting back out would mean travelling faster than light. Nothing can, so the horizon marks the point beyond which no signal returns.

Sources · 4
  • Black Holesscience.nasa.gov
  • Singularities and Black Holesplato.stanford.edu
  • Astronomers Capture First Image of a Black Holeeventhorizontelescope.org
  • Event horizonen.wikipedia.org
The receipts

Every sentence has a source. Here's one.

From the lesson “How large language models work”

A large language model takes text, splits it into smaller units called tokens, and predicts a probability distribution for what token should come next.

It generates text by choosing a token, adding it to the context, and repeating the process. It does not retrieve a finished sentence from a hidden book.

Read the whole lesson →
Why it matters
In a 2025 randomised controlled trial, learners who studied with ChatGPT answered 57.5% of a surprise test correctly 45 days later. Learners who studied without it answered 68.5%.

Barcaui (2025), Social Sciences & Humanities Open 12, 102287

One trial: 120 undergraduates, randomly assigned to two groups (p = .002, Cohen's d = 0.68). Directional, not a law - we link it because we'd want to check it too.

No customer logos here. Nodebook is new and we won't invent them - judge the lesson instead.

See a real lesson →
Try one

Three hard topics. Open one and read it.

Not a mock-up and not a video. These are lessons Nodebook compiled, on the page exactly as the app renders them. Press a subject to read its opening - one of them you can listen to.

Choose an example lesson
Law · compiled lesson

Applying the Rule Against Perpetuities

To apply the Rule Against Perpetuities, you check if a property gift will definitely become certain or fail within 21 years after someone alive today dies. This rule stops people from controlling property forever after they're gone.

Compiled from 8 sources, every one of them listed and linked at the foot of the lesson.

Read the whole lesson →Opens the real lesson. No account, no card.
The 6 concepts
  1. 1RAP's Core Elements
  2. 2Identifying the Measuring Life
  3. 3Vesting and the 21-Year Period
  4. 4Step-by-Step RAP Application
  5. 5Perpetuities Saving Clauses
  6. 6Modern Statutory Reforms: USRAP

Every concept opens with a question, defines the idea, names the near-miss it gets confused with, and says why it matters. Plus 4 figures, 9 quiz questions and 11 flashcards.

Mathematics · compiled lesson

Gödel's Incompleteness Theorems

Gödel's theorems show that even the most powerful mathematical systems cannot prove everything that is true within them, and they cannot prove that they are free from contradictions. This is achieved by turning statements into numbers and then constructing a special statement that essentially says, "I cannot be proven."

Compiled from 7 sources, every one of them listed and linked at the foot of the lesson.

Start here0:00 / 0:21

Chapter 1 of 19 · 18 min in full. The real narration, not a recording made for this page.

Read the whole lesson →Opens the real lesson. No account, no card.
The 6 concepts
  1. 1Formal Systems Basics
  2. 2Gödel Numbering & Encoding
  3. 3Self-Reference & Diagonalization
  4. 4First Incompleteness Theorem
  5. 5Second Incompleteness Theorem
  6. 6Implications & Misconceptions

Every concept opens with a question, defines the idea, names the near-miss it gets confused with, and says why it matters. Plus 3 figures, 10 quiz questions and 10 flashcards.

Machine learning · compiled lesson

Self-Attention in Transformer Models: Queries, Keys, and Values

Self-attention lets a transformer model understand how different words in a sentence relate to each other. Each word asks a question (query), offers an answer (key), and provides its content (value). This allows the model to identify the most important words for understanding any given word, even if they are far apart in the sentence.

Compiled from 7 sources, every one of them listed and linked at the foot of the lesson.

Read the whole lesson →Opens the real lesson. No account, no card.
The 7 concepts
  1. 1Self-Attention's Purpose
  2. 2Queries, Keys, Values
  3. 3Scaled Dot-Product Attention
  4. 4The Scaling Factor (√dₖ)
  5. 5Multi-Head Attention
  6. 6Positional Encoding
  7. 7Attention Masks: Practical Control

Every concept opens with a question, defines the idea, names the near-miss it gets confused with, and says why it matters. Plus 4 figures, 14 quiz questions and 12 flashcards.

How it works

Learn. Prove. Refresh.

1

Hand it a topic

Type an idea, an offhand question, or paste a useful link.

Why nothing escapes a black hole
Depth
BeginnerIntermediateProfessional
Explain it through…
Everyday lifeCookingSports
Teach me
2

Learn it clearly

A finite, cited lesson builds intuition before adding precision.

02The event horizonDefinitional
PlainExampleMetaphorVisual

What would it actually take to escape a black hole?

Cross this boundary and getting back out would mean travelling faster than light. Nothing can, so the horizon marks the point beyond which no signal returns.

4 cited sources·5 concepts
3

Prove what stuck

One short retrieval attempt tells Nodebook what to bring back later.

Recall LockThe event horizon
Why can light not escape past the event horizon?
Escaping would require moving faster than light, which is not possible.
Ideal answer revealedCompare the idea, not the wording.
Got itAlmostMissed

We’ll bring this idea back in 4 days.

The part other tools skip

Reading it is not remembering it.

A lesson you read once is mostly gone inside a week. A few well-timed attempts to recall it are the difference between having read something and knowing it.

With Nodebook’s reviewsRead once
allnone
Day 0Day 7Day 14Day 21
Illustrative - the Ebbinghaus shape, not your data. Reviews on days 1, 3, 7 and 16.
How it bends

Recall it, then be asked again.

Two surfaces do the work. One makes you retrieve the idea from memory instead of re-reading it; the other decides when you see it next, per concept, so the ideas you are shaky on come back and the ones you own leave you alone.

Recall LockThe event horizon
Why can light not escape past the event horizon?
Escaping would require moving faster than light, which is not possible.
Ideal answer revealedCompare the idea, not the wording.
Got itAlmostMissed

We'll bring this idea back in 4 days.

You explain it in your own words first, then reveal and rate what you actually remembered. That rating — not a page view — sets the next review. Explore active recall →

Ready to refresh1 concept
Neural Networks
BackpropagationLast recalled 6 days ago
Refresh this memory

Nothing else needs your attention right now.

When something is due you get one clear action; when your memory map is stable it stays quiet. Prefer to listen? Any lesson becomes chaptered narration, and Audio Recall puts the same pauses between chapters. Meet Audio Recall →

It compounds

Every lesson becomes a node in your book.

Nothing you compile is spent. Each lesson is broken into concepts, and a concept that turns up in a second lesson doesn’t repeat — it connects. Six subjects stop being six folders and start being one book.

Roman EmpireThe legion
Week one · 3 lessons
Roman EmpireThe legionMarcus Aurelius
Week five · 8 lessons
Roman EmpireThe legionNeural networksCross-entropyPhotosynthesisMarcus AureliusVirtue ethicsFrench Revolution
Week ten · 14 lessons · one graph
ideas within one lesson the same idea in two subjects
Concepts
38
Connections
60
Lessons
14
Busiest idea
7

Roman Empire” is doing the most work in this one — it came up in 7 different lessons, which is how the history and the philosophy ended up in the same graph. The library above is an example, not a real person’s. The drawing is not: it is the same layout engine the app runs, over the same shape of data it stores.

And it reads as a shelf, not a folder of documents — every lesson gets a real cover.

Pricing

Start free. Go deep for the price of a coffee.

Free
$0/mo
  • 3 lessons a month
  • Standard web sources
  • Spaced-repetition practice
  • Diagrams & formulas
Start free
Pro
$11.99/mo
  • 30 lessons a month - about one a day
  • Scholarly sources - real papers & DOIs
  • Full Professional depth
  • Chaptered audiobooks with read-along
Choose Pro

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Before you sign up

The questions we'd ask.

How is this different from asking ChatGPT?
A chat answers and then forgets you. Nodebook writes a finite lesson from sources you can open, splits it into concepts, and brings each one back for a retrieval attempt days and weeks later. That second half is what decides whether you still know it next month. The full comparison →
Does it make things up?
Lessons are compiled from retrieved material, checked against it, and published with the source list attached. No language model is perfect, which is exactly why the links are on the page: you can open a source and check a sentence yourself instead of trusting us.
What counts as a lesson?
One compiled topic, at whatever depth you pick. Every lesson costs the same, so going deep is never more expensive than skimming. Free includes 3 a month; Pro includes 30.
How long does a compile take?
About 90 seconds. You can close the tab while it works - the lesson is waiting in Learn when you come back.
Can I cancel?
Yes, from Settings, in one tap. Pro keeps working until the end of the period you have already paid for, and nothing you have compiled is taken away afterwards.
Is there an iPhone app?
The web app runs on your phone today, including audio lessons. A native iPhone app is on the way, and this page will say so the moment it ships.
Start

Learn something that lasts.

3 free lessons a month. No card.

iPhone app coming soon.