What Is the New Readwise Books App?
Readwise, known for creating a read-it-later application and a digital reading companion that tracks highlights across multiple services, is expanding its reach. The company is now directly challenging Amazon and its dominant e-book empire with the release of its latest software, Readwise Books. This platform functions as an e-book store while also helping users track what they have read, serving a purpose similar to Amazon's Goodreads platform.
The bootstrapped startup described the new application as a cross between Kindle and the Goodreads apps. It offers a single centralized place to buy, read, and track books. However, Readwise Books aims to offer more detailed reading stats than simply recording the dates you read a book and whether you finished it. It lets readers visualize richer reading data like words read, pace, depth, immersion, and sessions.
Meanwhile, its new store offers millions of ebooks from the big five publishers and others, initially in the United States, with more countries to come. Print books, fulfilled by Bookshop.org's distributor, and some audiobooks are available as well, the company notes.
Why the Reading App Market Is Changing
The launch comes at a time when there has been an explosion of new reading apps and book trackers. All of these tools hope to challenge Goodreads by introducing new features like book clubs, widgets, improved discovery features, goal-setting, better lists and organizational tools, and habit-tracking. However, few independent developers have gone so far as to launch an alternative to Amazon's Kindle e-books store. The Kindle store remains the industry leader, holding an 83 percent share of the market when Kindle Plus, formerly known as Kindle Unlimited, is included in the statistics.
One of Kindle's bigger advantages is that it offers an end-to-end solution for everything related to reading e-books, ranging from dedicated hardware devices to the book-tracking log. Readwise is not selling its own e-readers, but it is attempting to create its own community around reading. This community comes complete with tools for reading purchased and uploaded ebooks, tracking them in a manner similar to Goodreads, and sharing reading progress with friends.
How Book Tracking and Metrics Work in Readwise Books
The application also offers a number of ways to track books outside its direct ecosystem. This includes a way to track reading sessions by using Kindle's browser-based Cloud Reader and a feature that lets you snap photos of physical books to mark your progress. Plus, you can upload any digital EPUB files that lack digital rights management protections, which is a common e-book file format without copy protection. The application can even read your e-books aloud via text-to-speech technology.
Readwise believes its more in-depth metrics could be a major selling point, likening them to a Strava for reading, which is a clear reference to the metrics-heavy running application. The desire to read books, much like exercising and eating well, is laden with guilt, the company explained in a blog post penned by co-founders Daniel Doyon and Tristan Homsi.
Many people feel like they should be reading more, but feeling bad about it tends to change nothing. The session tracking taps into a different psychological mechanism by making the reading you are doing legible, following the adage that what is measured is improved. The company adds that the most consistent feedback from users is that the application has led them to read more without relying on willpower tricks like goal-setting, streaks, or scheduling.
Artificial Intelligence Integration and Open Technology
With publishers' permission, the application will support artificial intelligence-powered features as well. These features include session recaps, definitions and term lookups, word and phrase translations, and a location-aware ability to ask questions about the specific part of the text you are reading. So far, however, only Harper Collins has opted in to allow these capabilities.
Unlike the locked-down ecosystem found on Goodreads, Readwise is embracing open technology. This openness includes a public application programming interface and a Model Context Protocol server. The latter supports artificial intelligence agents that could be used to research book recommendations on your behalf, use your Readwise data to create a books page on your personal website, or wire up your hackable e-reader to log your sessions automatically, depending on how involved your artificial intelligence use cases may be.
Pricing, Availability, and Beta Access Details
The new Readwise Books application will remain free to use, though some artificial intelligence features will later go behind a paywall. By comparison, the company's prior applications for reading and tracking highlights are priced at either $7.99 per month each, or $9.99 per month for a combined subscription package.
The Books application is currently in a beta testing phase and requires an invite to access, unless you are already a paying Readwise subscriber.
