Readwise Beta - Effortlessly rediscover and organize your Kindle highlights

Hey PH! We're huge fans of Kindle, but we were pained by how hard it is to revisit and organize your highlights. It would often feel like we'd read a book and have phenomenal new insights, only to forget them a couple months later. Readwise sends you a daily email with some of your best past highlights, helping you actually remember what you read. We also let you effortlessly tag and rate your highlights. This lets you organize the insights you had from your books, turning them into long-lasting wisdom. The main features: - 💫 Effortlessly sync your Kindle highlights - 📬 Receive an email with some of your best highlights, every day - 💌 Categorize your highlights with different tags e.g "entrepreneurship", "happiness" - 🤓 Never forget what you learned from a book again Even if you don't read on Kindle, we'd love to hear what you think about the product and where you'd like us to import highlights from next! We're huge reading nerds, and are just getting started on our mission of improving how people read and learn from books.

There's something really fun about being able to highlight part of a book and get it reiterated over email — passive learning is really important if you're trying to retain lots of information.

Pros:

Finally a reason to highlight stuff in Kindle! I've been looking for a way to organize the information I've pulled out of books.

Cons:

It's still really early, it wasn't quite clear how some of the features (like deletion) work, but overall seems solid.

Nice. I thought of something similar but for highlights across kindle, instapaper and chrome. Used Google Keep for ssaving and tagging quotes but it's buggy. Good luck!

I actually stumbled upon Readwise in searching for a way increase the efficiency of the time I spend reading. It's been awesome to see it grow from 5 highlights in an email to the customization features today. Not only has it succeeded in helping me to retain more of the books I've read, it's also encouraged me to form positive habits around highlighting key sections as I read.

Pros:

I love how it keeps the things I've read fresh in my mind, and incentivizes me to pay attention to key passages as I read

Cons:

Some limitations around organizing highlights into groups but the newest features are making strong strides in that direction

I've had this on my side-project to-do list for a while now - really glad someone tackled this problem and got past the lack of decent API implementation from both Amazon and Goodreads for fetching highlights (besides https://read.amazon.com/notebook nobody knows about). Congrats to the team for shipping this! If you read a ton of non-fiction, going back to a particular excerpt can be a pain. Once you invest enough in ReadWise, this might very well be a solved problem. (Plus the deep links to the kindle app are so useful to see the highlight in context 🙌) Another use case this could solve for is this moment when you read a paragraph and really want to share it with a boss/colleague/friend because it's so relevant to them. But you're outside, sitting in the grass in a park. With your WIFI ad-supported Kindle. Because you're cheap and wanted to save $90. So you highlight and forget. If ReadWise manages to get you engaged with that content again, problem solved again 😀 A couple of ideas/friction points that are probably already on your roadmap I thought I'd share here : • I made 202 highlights in one book, and can't search them via the UI (but thank you for not including any pagination, so I can ⌘+F them 💯) • Could I navigate these 202 highlights by chapter of the book? • I want to bundle a bunch of highlights and share them with a friend via a unique link • I want to share all highlights of a book I just finished with my colleague • I want to associate a note to a highlight, so that I, or the person I share it to, understand the context behind why I highlighted that note • Etc, etc 😇 PS : I am (very?) biased against products that claim to "summarize a book for you" or "let you read a book in just 15 mins", and when I read "ReadWise" for the first time, that's what the name made me thought the product was about. "ReadWise" doesn't really imply the notion of "collecting" or "building wisdom" that an easy to parse database of highlights could.

I've been using Readwise (f/k/a Rekindled) for a few months and LOVE IT! Like the Dos Equis guy...I don't read all the time, but when I do, I re-inforce it with Readwise. It's a graet product with a talented and passionate team behind it!

Readwise is just a really cool way to enhance your reading experience. I love the feeling when I highlight something now that I know I'm going to see it again.

The email digest is already one of my favorite things in my inbox, but I'm also really excited to see them continue building out the actual "hub" for my highlights. It has the chance to be the best record of your reading habits and thoughts on books.

I highly recommend all readers give it a try.

Pros:

Gets the best parts from books I like back in front of my face. Since I know I'll see my highlights again, it's changed the way I highlight.

Cons:

I've been really impressed with how they've consistently improved it already, but automatic syncing would be cool if it's possible.

Overall, great way to have small reminders of your books and the ideas that you found important when reading them. Looking forwards to my favourites coming up again.

Pros:

Awesome to revisit books I read a while ago; Nice clean email format; Provides daily inspiration (depends on what you highlight!)

Cons:

Maybe everyday is a little too much, would like to set the days I get the email

This is great. It has some of the features that I loved with Readmill. Do you plan on having profiles and more social sharing capabilities?

I really enjoyed using Readwise during the private beta. It was fun to re-surface things that I once found interesting (but soon after forgot about), and I now find myself highlighting more often. It was clear from all of my interactions with the team that you guys are listening to users and really thinking hard about how to make the service great. Congrats on the milestone!

Excited to see innovation in a space which hasn't seen much of it in the past!

Pros:

An improvement over the Kindle note taking function. Really enjoy discovering new books with the recommended highlights feature

Cons:

Still in the early stages of development - would love to see a mobile app one day

This looks awesome - I'm excited to see some of the things I've highlighted because right now they just go into the Amazon abyss. Two questions: 1. Have you thought about allowing for setting the frequency of emails? Changing from daily to weekly, for example? 2. What is the Chrome extension for? It asked me to install it as part of sign-up, but doesn't seem to do anything except load the website (have to right click on it, left clicking doesn't do anything). What am I missing? Great work on this!

The developers have been amazing in requesting feedback and implementing new features. The product is still early, but I have no doubt that it will continue to improve in future iterations.

Pros:

Simplicity

Cons:

Light on customizability

I love it and can't wait to see what the future holds for Readwise.

Pros:

The service I've been searching for to make sense of my massive pile of ebook highlights

Cons:

Automatic syncing would be nice, as would grouping books by topic or date

There's no point in reading a book if you're going to forget everything. Use Readwise and retain your knowledge!

Pros:

It reinforces what I read so I get more value out of my reading time

Cons:

Keep doing what you're doing!

I think its a fun and novel concept for an app with a lot of potential for social networking. It looks like there is some machine learning going on behind the scenes that will continue to zero in on my exact reading interests as the user base grows. I'm really intrigued to learn more about similarities I have with other people who highlighted the same excepts.

Pros:

I like being reminded via email about various excerpts or quotes I've highlighted. It's inspirational for me to reread them regularly.

Cons:

I like the book recommendations based on my highlights and look forward to seeing how these continue to be refined.

Awful Experience syncing all my content to Notion. And then another awful experience trying to get a response from the customer support team once they realised that redoing the entire setup twice or thrice doesn't seem to work either! Been 11+ days without a response and no Notion Sync. Quite pointless without it for me honestly.

Overall, fantastic idea and execution.

Pros:

i went from never highlighting to making it a pleasant habit. readwise really helps me get more out of the reading I do.

Cons:

I'd trade all the tea in China for automatic syncing of highlights.

Killer app for anyone who's ever plowed through a dense text and had trouble carrying a conversation about it a week later!

Pros:

Incredibly simple way to increase retention particularly for fans of non-fiction. Also a fun way to be reminded of your favorite passages.

Cons:

None

So useful! Would be nice to also see all the popular highlights in a book.