SmarterReads Corporate Reading Programs: You: Read & Review Books. ORG: Curate, Measure & Build IP

Hello, Product Hunt. I'm Mike O'Brien, founder of SmarterMedium. I registered SmarterReads about twenty years ago, along with a handful of other Smarter… domains. Tying books to corporate learning seemed obvious. Buffett, Gates, and Cuban, among other leaders, never stop advocating reading. So I tried to build it, and each time I shelved it. The problem was never the books. It was the loop. Leaders publish reading lists every year. Summer lists. Books for new graduates. The five titles that shaped their leadership. Almost all of it is performative. Services emerged to perform the reading for you—a full book in fifteen minutes, and now AI does it for free. But nothing connected the reading to the outcome. The tool to close the loop existed all along: the LMS. It anchors the program on your corporate network, tying it directly to employee development. Here's how it works. The organization curates a list. Your people read books, not summaries. What gets tracked is the intellectual growth of your team. ‘Marked as read’ is what your people know. ‘Want to read’ is where they're headed. The review is their verdict, in their words. You own the data, the books, and the resulting IP—with no per-seat subscription fees. I built a demo to explore how this looks in practice: one list built from the books behind my own and one on AI Literacy. If you run L&D, what is stopping you from bringing actual reading back to your organization? Drop your questions below; I’ll answer every one. - Mike