A (not so short) Readwise Reader review
To Readwise or Not to Readwise
Readwise is one of those things you either love or think to be completely useless. The main gist is that Readwise is a resurfacing tool that helps you rediscover and memorize highlights from the books you read.
To use Readwise, import your highlights from your preferred reading app (such as Kindle or Apple Books), and it will show you a small selection of them every day. You can choose to save, discard, or even create learning flashcards and quizzes from the presented highlight. Tags and favourite selections can also be added.
For me, the biggest friction point was that Readwise is a paid service, and since I mainly read fiction books I didn’t find it worth it enough to take the plunge and pay the subscription.
However, early this year I was invited to try their new App, Reader. Reader allows you to add any source you can think of (RSS, Twitter threads, Books, Youtube videos…) and consume and annotate them within the Reader App. Any highlight that you make on the App will be synchronised and appear on Readwise, and you can even add your own comments to each one.
But… why?
Between books, articles and Twitter, saving information that feels interesting can get quite messy. My highlights tended to get fragmented and be distributed across a plethora of Apps until I got the time (which, frankly, I don’t usually have) to process and organise them.
My workflow was to annotate/save links in Obsidian that used to get hidden and forgotten in the middle of my myriad of notes. I know there are spaced repetition plugins available but it always felt like too much hassle to set them up.
Readwise, on the other hand, already offers that out of the box along with seamless synchronisation with several note-taking apps (including Obsidian and Notion), which makes it all much easier to work with. However, I never saw the point of keeping another subscription just for that. Then came Reader.
Reader gives you some things to love…
From an ebook reading point of view, there is a lot to love:
- You can activate scroll mode on every book — sorry page turn fans but I really dig this one!
- Books are stored locally, which means you don’t need to wait until a book is re-downloaded every time your phone decides to delete it to save a bit of flimsy storage — bye, Apple Books!
- Reader mode built-in for articles and tweets
- Youtube video transcription
…and some things to not love so much
Reader is splendid but there are some hard edges that need to be polished:
- There are some issues when importing epubs: the book cover is usually missing and some files can’t even be imported at all
- There’s no way to know how many pages are left in the current chapter
- Combining highlights is still a little bit messy
- It would be great to have audio/podcasts transcriptions, although this is something the amazing people at Readwise are already working on
So… what’s the verdict?
At $7.99 per month, Reader has a steep price, so it’s up to you if it’s worth paying for. In my case, I wasn’t 100% into the Kindle App and Apple Books kept deleting my files (even the books that I was reading at the moment) so I had to redownload every time I wanted to read something. So I was looking for a new reading App when Reader came to save the day.
Since it also added the ability to read from any source you can imagine and included Readwise in the price, I took the chance and gave it a go.
At the moment I am enjoying reading through Robert Jordan’s The Wheel of Time series of books and Readwise has proven to be great at keeping up with what’s happening (and my guesses on what will happen next!).
I also got into the habit of summarising every chapter which is then imported into my Notion via Readwise, which has also been a great help.
In any case, Readwise is something you will need to test yourself to make sure it is what you need. If I had to take sides, I’d say that Reader is definitely worth a try. Especially if you read non-fiction books, you will find Readwise to be a really useful tool.
