For the past few years, Readwise has been creating tools for advanced readers. There’s the eponymous product, Readwise, which stores and categorizes the highlights of your Kindle to help you remember what you’ve read. There’s Readwise Reader, an app for reading newsletters, PDFs, and web articles you’ve saved for later. And now there is Readwise Books, a complete platform for buying, reading and talking 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 and it’s a much broader read than most. Tristan Homsi and Daniel Doyon, co-founders of Readwise, like to call the platform “Strava for reading” because it can track how long, how much, and how fast you read, and can show that information to the friends you make on the Readwise Books app. The app’s home page is a source of what other people are reading, with comments and recommendations interwoven.
“Strava for reading” was not the original goal of Readwise Books, which has been part of the Readwise plan from the beginning. “Literally, Dan and I talked about this when we met,” Homsi says. “We think the Kindle could be a lot better. We really didn’t think it would take us more than nine years to get to this point.” But it turns out, Doyon adds, that for all his ideas about innovation in books, “no one is left waiting for a better Kindle.” But there is one thing they do want: a better Goodreads. “Everyone hates Goodreads.”
So in a sense, Readwise Books’ plan is to adopt Kindle and first adopt Goodreads. The Readwise Books app offers a good way to keep track of the books you want to read, are reading, and have read; It even syncs with your Kindle account to let you keep track of books you bought on Amazon by taking photos of their front and back pages. You can rate and review books and see what others have said. It’s a little Strava, a little Letterboxd, and much prettier to look at than Goodreads.
The long-term goal, of course, is to get people to stop buying Kindle books and start buying them on Readwise. Homsi and Doyon have spent the last few years working to reach agreements with the five major American publishers to have a competitive library of books available. That meant endless negotiations, security reviews, DRM debates, and more; both co-founders seem exhausted just talking about the process. But in the end, thanks to several small miracles, they managed to close the deals. And since those agreements govern the price of books and many things about how they are sold and presented, they bring Readwise to a nearly level playing field almost immediately.
Everything took much longer than expected, but Doyon and Homsi think the timing could be pretty good. Digital book reading continues to grow, especially among young people; A lot of that reading is done on phones and tablets. Meanwhile, a new generation of E Ink devices like the small Xteink and the Boox Palma line have expanded the universe of hardware available to a company like Readwise.
Not long ago, Doyon says, they would have had no choice but to build their own e-reader. (And he says they still could.) Now, they can make sure it runs on an E Ink-compatible version of Android.
After a couple of days using Readwise Books, I can safely say that I already like it more than pretty much all of the competition. It’s a much nicer app than anything you can get from Kindle or Kobo; has many ways to customize the look of books; and at least for now, I find that the tracking features force me to read more rather than bother me. (Homsi says some of the early versions of the gamification features were substantially more annoying.) I found a few bugs and the half-integration with Kindle is a little confusing in places, but it’s already a really nice place to read.
Of course, I, like millions of people, already have a Kindle and many Kindle books. Switching e-book platforms is difficult, and Doyon says he doesn’t count on everyone doing it right away. He says he’s hopeful Readwise can persuade existing users to switch, so they can sync their notes and progress more smoothly. He also hopes that the arrival of AI, and the ways in which dependence on AI can rot our brains, will bring many people back to the idea of reading more deeply. And many of those people might be looking for a nicer, more social place to do it.
