I love reading books.
However, I end most of my days regretting that I couldn’t find enough time to read. between blogs, podcasts, chatting with friends, these days I get so many non-fiction book recommendations that my kindle library grows much faster than I can read.
You are reading: Apps that summarize books
I have another problem. Business books generally fall into three categories:
- big: full of interesting and enjoyable ideas to read (like the unicorn project or lost and founder)
- boring: lots of good ideas written in an extremely boring way
- bad: few ideas lost in a plethora of useless and boring pages
I love the books in the first category and they are usually the ones I review here on my blog. Unfortunately, I hate others.
It usually takes me forever to get to the end of boring non-fiction books.
I give up in the first few chapters when I read a bad one. and that sucks because sometimes they still have some interesting concepts that I’d like to absorb.
That’s why the other weekend I came up with a new strategy: read the whole book when it’s cool. support for book summaries for categories n. 2 and no. 3.
I’ve spent the last few days testing the top 4 book digest apps to see which one is worth subscribing to. and now I have decided to share my findings with you to save you some time if you are faced with the same question.
The book summary apps and websites I’ve tried are:
- blinkist
- short form
- getabstract
- instaread
- mentor (2022 addition)
but before declaring the best book summary app in 2022…
Is a book summary worth reading?
yes and no.
But before we dive any deeper, a quick premise. I am considering only non-fiction books. it would be crazy to read the summary of a novel in my opinion. this also seems to be a consolidated trend in the industry. All of the book summary apps I’ve reviewed focus on non-fiction books.
Now back to your question.
if I had enough time, I’d probably avoid reading book summaries…it feels a bit like cheating.
but I must admit that it is an effective way to learn the key concepts of an entire book, usually in less than 30 minutes. the big question mark is… will they stick?
The added value of reading a whole book is that you usually get lots of examples and repetition of key concepts. this is useful for sticking and convincing yourself that it’s a good idea to put into practice.
by reading the summary you get to the core concepts immediately but miss a lot of context. feels like eating meal replacement powders – you’re likely to get all the nutrients. but you lose all the flavor.
This problem can be big or small depending on the type of book you are reading.
if it’s a book about “human resources best practices”, it’s probably okay to read the key ideas in 30 minutes.
If you’re reading personal development books or self-improvement books… well, my personal opinion here is that the key ideas are pretty much the same in all of these books. and you probably already know them. you lack the motivation to implement them.
In this scenario, reading the original book might be better. the way the author communicates the message. the motivational examples he uses to reinforce it are what really matters and are likely to be missing from summaries.
So, if you’re the kind of person who could benefit from non-fiction book summaries, let’s find out which app is best for you.
my criteria for choosing the best book summary apps in 2022
Before I started the free trial of all these book digest apps, I defined some personal criteria to choose which one I would subscribe to and which one I would cancel.
I defined four main categories to classify applications:
- book catalogue: how many book summaries do you have? Do you have the books I want to read? this is an important one and a deciding factor for me.
- abstract quality: another critical factor. is the summary ok? Did you capture the central ideas? Is the quality consistent across multiple books?
- Original content: Do they also have their own original content in addition to the book summaries? are they good?
- features: do they have a mobile app? Is the website or app easy to use? Do they have any interesting unique features?
As you can see, I haven’t added price as a relevant category. That’s because, regardless of cost, if I read summaries consistently, I’ll save a lot of money compared to buying each individual book.
In fact, I added the last two categories after I started testing the various apps. It seems that everyone is moving beyond book summaries and starting to produce their own original content. often selected summaries of several books on a specific topic.
On the feature side, most of them these days also do audio summaries of most books (but machine generated audio). I also find the app’s ease of use to be a very important factor since I’ll be using it every day.
Finally, if you’re curious how I tested the catalog section, here’s the list of 12 books I’ve been looking for:
- why we sleep
- atomic habits
- no rules govern
- the subtle art of not giving a fuck
- ai superpowers
- lost and founder
- the income marketing book
- the unicorn project
- superfans
- how to lie with statistics
- traffic secrets
- the training of a manager
okay, time to start reading some book summaries and pick a winner!
blink
blinkist is probably the best known digest app on the market and the one that really started this industry. It’s reasonably priced, starting at $14.99 a month or $89.99 a year, and it works great.
They divide book summaries into what they call flickers. it’s usually a good mapping of book chapters or main ideas. each blink usually takes no more than 5 minutes to read (or listen to). at the end of the book summary, there is always a final part that summarizes all the central ideas of the book.
Being the oldest book summary service, the quality and the catalog are usually very good.
Catalog – Vote 8
In blinkist I was able to find 8 of the 12 titles I used for the test. good but not crazy good. in fact, I expected better from their catalog of over 4,500 book summaries.
Clearly, they are focusing more and more on their original productions. if a title is a best seller, you’re 99% sure you’ll find it on blinkist. when you search for more niche books, there’s a 50-50 chance you won’t find them.
quality – vote 7
The good thing about blinkist is its consistency. you can expect all book summaries to be of fairly good quality. sums up a lot. sometimes I would have preferred more information on specific details.
The average abstract takes 15 minutes to read. I would have preferred to go up to 30 minutes and get more details.
Still, they did a pretty good job of identifying all the core concepts of each book and expressing them in a very convincing way.
original content – rate 7
Most of their original content is in the form of short broadcasts. you can think of them as mini podcasts where each episode is typically 10 minutes long. there is also a written summary for each episode.
They are of good quality and with a good selection of authors. However, I’m not a super fan of the audio format so I ended up not consuming them a lot.
features – rate 7
blinkist has a very good offer. you can read on a desktop through a browser, on mobile devices, and on tablets.
Quality is very good with very high readability of book summaries.
What I didn’t like was the inconsistency of the user experience across devices.
I love the fact that you can highlight text and save it for later. revisiting my best moments from a book is something I do often. however, I couldn’t figure out how to do it on my ipad. and the synchronization between the browser and the ipad is weird.
On the browser, the main dashboard is focused on the books you’re reading. On iPad on the discovery of new contents. Overall their book summary app is good but not yet great.
a very nice feature worth mentioning is the ability to sync your highlights to evernote and book summaries to kindle to read there and keep summaries and full books under the same umbrella.
short form
shortform is relatively new to the game, as far as I know they still have a decent catalog. the price is surprisingly higher than blinkist, even if the catalog is much smaller.
they charge $24 per month or $197 for the annual subscription. They offer a 5-day free trial where you can explore the entire catalog for free.
Overall they have the best book summaries of all the apps reviewed here and a year after I wrote this post I am still subscribed to their service and it is the app I use the most.
Catalog – Vote 7
The catalog is smaller than blinkist’s as you might expect from a newcomer to the market. They claim over 1000 book summaries and as you can guess most of them are bestsellers.
I was only able to find 5 of the 12 books used for testing. I was expecting something more, to be honest. most of the marketing books were missing and even the best sellers had some gaps.
The good thing is that they seem to be adding new titles at a good pace.
See Also: 8 Life-Changing Books About Fear and How to Overcome it
(update 2022) the catalog continues to grow slowly but steadily. They recently released a video summary series that is free on youtube. they are also posting super short summaries on instagram.
quality – vote 8.5
The quality of your summaries is the true strength of shortform. I love how they structure the summaries and the level of depth.
In my opinion, the short form has the only summaries that can really replace reading the entire book.
all the other apps are just useful for understanding if you might like a book before you buy it or absorbing some quotes to sound smart to your friends.
They have a generous 1 page summary to get you started. it is of very high quality and for a quick read you can stop there.
but if you want to dig deeper they also offer a more detailed chapter-by-chapter summary. when it makes sense they also have exercises at the end of some chapters.
Another incredible strength of the abbreviated form is how they make connections outside of the specific book to really help you understand the topic. they often mention other books that cover the same topic to add value to the summary and give you more context/different points of view.
shortform has the best book summaries of the apps reviewed here. period!
original content – rate 6
They do not offer original content, but they do present summaries of the main articles of the American press. the selection is still quite limited, with around 500 items in the catalogue. nothing to go crazy about.
There is an audio version for all summaries, but it’s not human narrated, it’s actually an artificial voice that you wouldn’t hear for 30 minutes.
features – rate 8
good web and mobile versions, so avid readers can enjoy your summaries everywhere.
The experience is consistent across devices and there is full support for highlighting text or adding notes which, unlike blinkist, also works great on mobile devices.
A nice touch is the support for dark mode in the reader to enjoy your summaries also at night.
The mobile app has improved a lot over the last year and is now very fast and responsive. overall, it’s a very nice experience.
an important one for the abbreviated format is the possibility to download a summary of a book in pdf format. much more flexible than the kindle integration found in blinkist.
Another feature I love is its support for read sync. readwise is my go-to app for collecting all the highlights from the books and articles I’ve read and reviewing them daily for ideas. it’s great to have my shortform highlights imported in there.
update 8/8/2022: shortform just released another great feature that saves me money and makes my life easier. now integrate and sync notes with notion!
Overall it’s a great book summary app from a software standpoint and they keep improving it with a good pace.
getsummary
getabstract has a unique approach. have been in the book summary app space forever with a strong focus on enterprise offerings.
Looking at their website, it’s clear that their main focus is to sell businesses to give multi-user access to their employees. still, they also have subscription plans for private users priced at $29.90 per month. goes up to $290 for annual subscriptions.
interestingly, if you connect from Europe, there is also a cheaper plan that gives you access to a more limited catalogue.
His approach is different from all the other players. While everyone plays in a gray area from a copyright point of view, getabstract acquires the rights from the publisher before writing a book summary.
Catalog – Vote 4
Although they have the largest catalog with over 20,000 book summaries, they also have the worst catalog.
since they are trying to acquire rights to summarize books, you will find many niche books, but very few best sellers. I didn’t find any of the 12 books I was looking for, which is shocking.
for some of them, a hotfix was available. for others, they said they had selected the book as interesting and were trying to secure the rights. for many nothing could be found.
Clearly, the approach of this book summary service is different from the others. if you’re looking for random books to read or some very specific things, it might be a good fit. otherwise I’d stay away.
quality – vote 6
Given your unique approach, I expected very high quality summaries. I was disappointed.
don’t get me wrong, they’re good. but not amazing. they’re also quite short, in a way comparable to blinkist. Audio summaries are available for most books and are typically 8-12 minutes long.
unique content – vote 0
It looks like they don’t have any unique content added to their offer. not a big deal for me as I’m mainly looking for book summaries.
My take here is that other players acknowledge that there is a copyright threat to their core offering. then they started to differentiate themselves with more and more unique content. getabstract secure legal rights before writing a review so they don’t feel the need to diversify their offering.
features – rate 6
everything works smoothly on both the website and the mobile app.
They
support highlighting and have the concept of channels where you can create (or consume) curated book collections.
I don’t like the reading experience on browsers. A lot of distracting elements in the interface and small fonts make them look more like regular blog posts than the interface of an ebook reader. On the iPad app the experience is way better.
On the plus side, you can download a pdf version of all your summaries. Overall, it’s not among my favorite book digest apps.
install
another established player in the book summary app space. instaread’s unique version of book summary apps is to produce a lot of high-quality unique content in addition to the summaries.
the price is relatively cheap, starting at $8.99 per month or $89 if you go annually. They also have a nice lifetime offer where you can get unlimited access forever at $299. Not bad at all if you plan on reading book summaries as a life habit.
the free trial lasts 7 days.
Catalog – Vote 5.5
instaread has over 1000 book summaries in short form, but in my selection of 12 books, I could only find 4 of them, the greatest hits. All the other niche books I was looking for weren’t available.
This may also be due to the fact that within the 1000+ books, they also include a lot of fiction.
quality – vote 6
when it comes to content quality…it’s ok, but not my favorite. it’s basically a collection of chapter summaries with the key points from each chapter.
everything is very condensed and schematic with a bullet point approach. I don’t love it, but that’s a matter of personal taste. I have to admit it’s well done.
I missed the introduction of a page that has the short form.
There is an audio version available for each book. just like the other apps, it’s not a human reading, but a generated voice.
unique content – rate 8
instaread is clearly committed to original content.
First of all (although not unique), they have a large collection of article summaries from the top publishers they’ve partnered with. this includes articles from the new york times, harvard business reviews, and many others.
In addition to this, they have many originals instaread. short books on almost any subject. a strong area of focus seems to be biographies. They cover anyone from Kamala Harris to Jack Dorsey. they are generally well done and insightful. read time for your original averages at the 15-minute mark.
See Also: 20 Press Release Examples to Draw Inspiration From in 2022
Features – 6
They are web and mobile friendly with a pretty good app.
The reading experience is good, although going from one chapter summary to the next could be better.
A unique feature of the mobile app is the flashcards section, where you can read the flashcards, each containing a key takeaway from the book.
It is not possible to save highlights from summaries…this, for me, is a real deal breaker.
mentor
mentorista is a new entry that I discovered in January 2022.
has a unique touch. his approach is not just to summarize books, but rather to help you execute what you learn.
I can relate to the core value proposition of this app. Way too many people use the number of books they read in a year as their key metric rather than focusing on really understanding the book and taking action.
That’s what intrigued me most about this app. let’s see if he kept his promises.
catalog – 5
the catalog here is very limited. Of the 12 books in my basket, I could only find 3, the most popular and focused on personal growth. amazingly they didn’t even have the “rule no rules” which is very popular.
A back of napkins calculation based on their book page as of March 2022, shows only 182 books in their catalog.
Somehow this was expected, metorist launched later compared to their competitors in the book roundup space and clearly, they have yet to build their catalog.
The good note is that since I’ve signed up to the service, they’ve been adding 2 to 4 books every week and the browsing of the catalog is very pleasant with a lot of curated collections.
quality – 6
what can I say…it’s okay but not great. summaries are very short, divided into short pages. most books are between 10 and 20 pages long and there is a bit of inconsistency between page lengths from book to book.
what I liked about mentorist is the audio summary. it is usually in the 20 minute range and eventually not recorded by a robotic voice but read by a human. In general, listening to the summaries has been quite a pleasant experience.
Personally, I think I would use it to understand if I want to buy and read the full version of a book or read something that doesn’t really interest me. for something that matters to me, summaries are also short.
single content – 0
At this time, the mentorist does not have any unique content and is only focusing on summarizing popular books.
It’s a choice that somewhat makes sense given that they’ve chosen app dynamics as a differentiator while other players in the space have the same type of app and are trying to diversify more based on the catalog and their unique content catalog. .
features – 8
Feature wise, mentorist has created a pretty good app for consuming abridged books. as you can see it supports dark mode and is generally always pretty fast and responsive.
what I like least is the reading experience. instead of a full page reader, it opens the summary in a relatively small window.
Highlights work very well with a dedicated page to check them and the capability to set reminders to read them again and set aside some time to brainstorm.
Finally, at the bottom of each book’s summary page, there’s a handy conclusion you can add to your list. it only takes one click and comes with a few quick steps to get it up and running.
Once added you’ll be asked what’s the objective you want to achieve with that specific takeaway and you’ll receive reminders.
You can also log your progress and add notes.
Overall it’s a very good app with a strong idea behind it.
good enough to forget about the small catalog and average quality summaries? not for me. I don’t think a “to-do list” tied to a book summary would make much of a difference to me. but if they improve the quality and the catalog they can be on the right track to have a real differentiation in this market.
other book summary websites
There are many other players in the space. I’ve tried several, like 12min, perlego, and readingraphics for visual learners.
All of these websites offer their own version of the “book summary app” space. I don’t think it’s worth mentioning them in this comparison due to the size of their catalogue.
It will be interesting to visit them again in a year (yes, I promise I’ll keep it updated at least once a year) and see which one increased its catalog the most to become more attractive.
what will happen to the book summaries space?
my personal opinion is that this space is too crowded and there is too little differentiation between players.
adding more books, of course, is the best way to get more customers. on the other hand, once all the bestsellers are covered, increasing the number of summaries for niche books may be too costly compared to the number of potential customers they could attract.
This could also open up opportunities for smaller players who focus on a specific niche. As an example, I would be 100% happy to sign up even at a premium price for a specialized marketing book service.
the other question mark is legal. I’m not a lawyer so I don’t know if book summaries are legal or not. of course, things are changing. A few years ago, all services used original book covers. nowadays, nobody does.
Of course, there’s a level of risk involved in this business, and if the space gets big enough, publishers could partner with these apps or go head-to-head with them and take the whole pie.
Finally, another potential disruption to this industry could be AI and specifically gpt-3. this new system has already proven to be able to write books… it will be relatively simple to use it to write book summaries on a large scale and with good consistency.
best book summary app in 2022
I guess it’s time to declare a winner.
let’s go for exclusion!
getabstract…sorry, not my cup of tea. I loved the fact that you guys were the only ones that didn’t require me to put in my credit card to participate in the trial… but your catalog just doesn’t suit my interests.
mentor… the idea behind this is nice, helping you put what you learn into practice. but the catalog and summary extension are not where they should be now.
instaread… well played with original content and article summaries, but didn’t excel in catalog or summary quality, so I don’t see a reason to sign up, I’m canceling my trial, but it could be a good option for many.
blinkist…size does matter. and when it comes to the books that interest me, they have the largest database. however, quality is the most important thing to me, which is why in this 2022 update I moved blinkist to second place. your summaries are too short for me. they don’t have the best mobile app. overall, the quality is consistent and it’s reasonably priced.
short form… is my winner for the 2022 edition of this post. the catalog is still not where i would like it to be, but it keeps growing, the app is great. I was allowed to download pdf versions of the abstracts and the quality of the abstracts is excellent. by far the only ones that can really replace reading the entire book and passing enough information to make it actionable. it’s more expensive, but it’s a price I’m more than happy to pay for the value I get.
All things considered, shortform is the winner of my roundup of the best book summary websites in 2022.
conclusions
That’s all for this year. it was a close battle between blink and short form, but in the end, to call a winner, I just went with the one that I still use much more frequently. if you want to choose only one app, choose the short form, you won’t regret it. If you can afford to spend a bit more, add blinkist to the mix for a quick overview of a larger number of books.
I hope I have helped you save some time and money by choosing the best tool among all the book summary sites.
Now it’s up to you to decide if reading book summaries is good enough for you. I still have mixed feelings about it and wish I had more time to read the full books. unfortunately I don’t and have found these summaries to be helpful when there is something I know I wouldn’t love to read but would still be valuable for my personal growth.
Did I miss some apps in this roundup? If there’s a service worth trying that I didn’t mention, let me know in the comments below and I’ll be happy to add it.
extra tip: book digest apps coupon code
No, I’m just kidding. I don’t have any coupon code. but…
I have a couple of tips to save some money by subscribing to most of these apps.
First of all, wait for the full duration of your trial. some of them may send you a 10% discount if you upgrade to a paid plan earlier.
Second, sign up through their websites, not the mobile app. This is for a couple of reasons:
- some websites have popups that offer a 10% discount if you sign up for a trial
- some apps have different prices if you sign up on browser or mobile. the mobile is usually expensive (due to the % that apple and google have to pay)
Finally, even if you shouldn’t, if you live in Europe with the current Euro/US dollar exchange rate, you may want to use a VPN and log in to $ to mask your connection as a US resident. uu. I usually use tunnelbear for this.