Company

Booksmart is a company founded in Oslo, Norway by Fredrik Skjelvik. We want to make digital textbooks awesome and accessible (the textbook publishing industry makes digital textbooks shitty and inaccessible - we will help them fix this).

We are located at Parkveien 1A, 0350 Oslo, and our company email address is contact@booksmart.cc - reach out if you have anything to say or ask.

Vision

There's a version of AI in education where everyone gets lazier. AI writes your essays, summarizes your readings, does your problem sets. You absorb less, not more. That's one possible future.

We're trying to build the other one.

Here's something that's been known in learning science for a long time: reading is mostly passive. You feel productive while you're doing it, but the information doesn't really stick until you use it — until you close the book and try to answer a question from memory, work through a problem, explain a concept in your own words. That's what actually encodes things in your brain. Active recall, not passive reading.

I learned this the hard way. In university, I was a compulsive note-taker — terrified of missing something, I'd meticulously write everything down. A friend of mine never took notes. He just hunted down practice questions and worked through them. He got the best grades of anyone I knew. He wasn't smarter than me. He just understood what actually makes things stick.

The problem was always supply and feedback. There are only so many practice questions in a textbook. And when you get one wrong, the textbook just... sits there. AI removes both of those constraints completely. It can generate fresh problems indefinitely, and it can tell you — immediately, precisely — where your reasoning went wrong. A tighter feedback loop means more active recall per hour of studying. More active recall means faster learning. The math is simple.

The obvious place to put this isn't another chat window or a separate app. It's inside the textbook itself.

Textbooks already have everything: the knowledge, organized by experts, in a logical sequence, with vetted practice questions. They are, in many ways, a remarkable technology. The problem is they're static. You read, you highlight, you close the book. There's no back-and-forth. There's no exploration — no way to pull on a thread you're curious about, or get an immediate explanation when something doesn't click.

So students are drifting. They're finding other resources. I've talked to a lot of medical students while building Booksmart, and they confirmed it: textbooks are losing ground to YouTube videos, ChatGPT, and third-party study apps. Their professors aren't happy about it, and honestly, they have a point — a lot of that material isn't as rigorous or complete. But you can't really blame the students. Static PDFs are just not a compelling experience anymore.

Books have evolved before — from papyrus to print to digital. AI is a big enough shift that it justifies another evolution: from static documents to something dynamic.

That's what Booksmart is trying to be. For now, it works with PDF — which is what most textbooks are, and probably will be for a while. But the long-term vision is bigger: a new kind of textbook that's built for AI from the ground up. Structured and rigorous, the way good textbooks are. But alive.

If you're a student, we built this for you. If you're a publisher, an educator, or someone who cares about where learning is going — we'd love to talk.