For the past several years, Readwise has been building Tools for Power Readers. The named product is, readwhich stores and categorizes your Kindle highlights to help you remember what you've read. There is The reading readeran app for reading newsletters, PDFs, and web articles you've saved for later. And now there's Readwise Books, a complete platform to buy, read and talk about books.
Readwise Books is currently in beta, available by invitation or to existing Readwise subscribers. I've been testing the app for a few days now, and this read is bigger than most. Tristan Homsi and Daniel Doyon, cofounders of Readwise, like to call the platform the "Strava for reading" because it can track how long, how much, and how fast you read, and it can show that information to friends that you create in the Readwise Books app. The app's homepage is a feed of what other people are reading, including comments and recommendations.
"Strava for reading" was not the original goal of Readwise books, which have been part of the Readwise project since the beginning. "Literally, Dan and I talked about it when we first met," Homsey says. "We feel like Kindle can be a lot better. We really didn't think it would take more than nine years to get to this point." But it turns out, Doyon added, that for all his ideas about innovation in books, "nobody sits around wishing for a better Kindle." But there's one thing they long for: a better Goodreads. "Everybody hates Goodreads."
In a sense, then, Readwise Books' plan is to take on Goodreads first and take on Kindle. The Readwise Books app offers a great way to track the books you want to read, are reading, and have read. It even syncs with your Kindle account so you can track the books you've bought from Amazon by taking photos of your opening and closing pages. You can rate and review books and see what others have said. It's a little bit Strava, a little bit Letterboxd, and much nicer to look at than Goodreads.
The long-term goal, of course, is to get people to stop buying Kindle books and start buying from Readwise. Homsi and Doyon have worked over the past several years to reach agreements with all five major US publishers to make a competitive library of books available. This meant endless negotiations, security reviews, DRM discussions, and more - both co-founders grew tired of just talking about the process. But eventually, through a series of small miracles, they struck a deal. And because these deals control the prices of books and many things about how they are sold and presented, they bring Red Wise into the playing field almost immediately.
It all took a lot longer than expected, but Dion and Homesey think their time may actually be pretty good. Digital book reading Continues to growespecially among the youth; A large amount of this reading happens on phones and tablets. Meanwhile, a new crop of E Ink devices like the smaller Xteink and Boox Palma line have expanded the universe of hardware available to a company like Readwise.
Not long ago, Doyon says, he would have had no choice but to build his own e-reader. (And he says they still can.) Now, all they can do is make sure it runs on an e-ink-friendly flavor of Android.
After a few days of using Readwise books, I can confidently say that I already find it better than virtually all of its competition. It's a much nicer-looking app than anything you'll find on a Kindle or Kobo. It has many ways to customize how the books look. And at least for now, I'm finding the tracking features to keep me reading more instead of bothering me. (Homsi says some early versions of the gamification features were quite annoying.) I've found some bugs, and half the integration with the Kindle is a bit confusing in places, but it's already a great place to read.
Of course, I, like millions of other people, already own a Kindle and many Kindle books. Switching to ebook platforms is difficult, and Doyon says he's not counting on everyone to do it immediately. He says he's optimistic that Readwise can convince existing users to switch, so that their notes can be synced and move forward seamlessly. He's also hoping that the advent of AI, and the ways in which reliance on AI can corrupt our brains, will get many people back to the idea of ​​reading more deeply. And that a group of those people might be looking for a nicer, more social place to do that.
