Blinkist Review 2022 [September]: Pros & Cons of the Blinkist App

YOU ARE READING: Blinkist Review 2022 [September]: Pros & Cons of the Blinkist App AT PhebinhvanhocEN

how good is the blinkist app? It is useful? what does it feel like as a paying customer? And what about the prices? Does it hold up against other book summary services? The goal of my blinkist review is to answer all those questions and more.

If you’d rather watch a video, you can watch my live walkthrough of the blinkist app below. this includes an analysis of its pros and cons and the price.

You are reading: Best books on blinkist

For a detailed review of the blinkist application in written form, please read below or skip to any section using this table of contents:

if you want to go back to it at any time, just hit the little up arrow icon in the bottom right corner of this page.

For more information about the blinkist company, details of individual features, and a tour of the web app and how it feels compared to the app, check out my explainer guide to blinkist.

For this review, we’ll start with a short summary where I’ll give you short answers to the most important questions.

quick summary of my blinkist review (FAQ)

Is the blinkist app free? yes, but as a free user, you can only read “the daily selection” which is a random summary of the book.
what is it like to use the blinkist app? The user experience is simple, easy, and fast, thanks to blinkist’s minimalist interface, focused features, and sleek design. it is geared towards reading and listening, which are its main use cases.
blinkist works offline? yes. summaries you add to your library will automatically download in text format. you can also download audios, even automatically, and delete them again when you’re done listening.
how many books are on blinkist? there are over 5000 books in the blinkist library and the team adds about 40 new titles per month.
how much does blinkist cost? the monthly price is $12.99, but if you buy the annual plan, you get 50% off. however, if you use an affiliate link like ours, you can get another 35% off, with a final price of $5.34 per month (that’s $0.18 per day). you can do it here.
is blinkist worth the money? i think so. is the cheapest book summary service in absolute terms, costs less than a coffee a day (or in some places even a month!), offers excellent value for money, and beats most book summary sites. free books.

what are the pros and cons of reading book summaries (in general)?

When reviewing a tool or service, most people immediately jump to what they like and what they don’t like. that’s a mistake, especially when looking at one of the many services in a particular category. in this case, book summaries.

The concept of a book summary itself has some specific advantages and disadvantages. naturally these will be transferred to blinkist and any other book summary service. you really can’t blame any particular company for them.

let’s look at them first, so we can better identify blinkist’s unique advantages and disadvantages later.

pros of reading book summaries:

will omit all unnecessary information. this is especially useful for books that only have one or a few good points. it also helps you avoid bad books altogether.
you can learn more and about different topics faster. Instead of being stuck in a meditation book for a month, you can read a summary in a few minutes. then you can jump to the next mindfulness book or a whole new topic.
You’ll probably remember more without taking notes. Because book summaries focus on facts and short ways to illustrate them, you’ll likely come out of a summary with 3-5 things you’ll remember. if you read a whole book without taking notes, it’s hard to memorize anything correctly.

cons of reading book summaries:

You will lose most of the story and humor of the book. This is bad, because it makes reading fun. depending on how much you connect with the story, it will also help you remember a lot of stuff, even if you may have to take notes.
you’ll miss out on great ideas and spontaneous insights from really great sources . books. The best books hit hard on every page. it is impossible to transfer all your knowledge to a summary. some books you just have to read the whole thing to get the most out of them.
Because of a lack of context, you may interpret the facts incorrectly. Sometimes a summary expresses an idea in one way, while the context of the book establishes it in another. but because that context is now missing, you’re interpreting the idea differently and thus getting an impression the author didn’t want you to get.
Now you’re relying not just on the author of the book, but also who wrote the summary. If the summary writer does a poor job, you lose. for example, they may not include an important story and therefore you may not remember a crucial fact.

again, this applies to all book summaries and the services that provide them. so with that in mind, let’s turn our attention to the user experience of the blinkist application.

how does it feel to use the blinkist app?

first, the blinkist app is available for both iphone and android. downloading the app is free. you can register using your email address or facebook account. When you open the app for the first time, you’ll get a short tutorial on how it all works.

One of the first things you’ll notice is that the app only has three tabs to choose from:

discover. this is where you can browse your library and find new titles.
library. here you will have access to your personal selection of books.
you. this is where your saved settings and highlights are.

This is great, because it makes navigating the app and choosing what to do really easy. let’s look at the individual tabs.

1. the discover tab

There are seven ways to find summaries of new books within the blinkist app:

You can search for a specific title, author or keyword.
the daily minute is a brief introduction to the book summary of the day.
You can explore its 27 categories.
The application generates personalized reading recommendations for you.
There are several book lists curated by experts and authors.
The Trending Flashes are the ones that are popular on this moment.
The “new” section shows you the most recently added titles.

Because they have multiple ways to explore, you can find specific books and topics you’re looking for and randomly find new things.

2. the library tab

this is the central tab, the main view, the home page, so to speak. your library is a list of all the summaries you have saved to read, which you can do in all discoveries modes using the ⨁ (plus) icon.

You will see a blue progress bar for all the books you have started and a green bar for all the ones you have completed. You can also filter your library by just audiobooks and how much progress you’ve made. finally, you can sort it by the books you’ve most recently added or opened, how much progress you’ve made, and alphabetically.

You can even create your own tagging system, bookmark books on your profile, or download the audio of any book with a single tap. Text summaries of all the books in your library will be downloaded automatically, so you can always read them offline.

Here, you will also see a small dark blue banner at the bottom, prompting you to continue reading your last summary where you left off. the library is where you’ll start most of your reading journeys within the app.

3. the you tab

This tab is a very simple profile. It just shows a list of your favorite books (which you can control with the ❤︎ (heart) button or by using the three dots icon in your library) and your best moments.

Your favorites list is a way to further filter books, but I personally don’t use this feature as I think the library does quite a bit of that.

Your highlights are sorted by book, and if you tap on one, you’ll see which blink each came from. you can also share them directly on facebook, twitter, whatsapp, email and many other services from here.

Finally, this is where you’ll find your settings. You can change the language (they have German and English), turn on email notifications for the daily minute, and choose how you want to download the audios. . there is an option to automatically download, to disable mobile data and even to automatically delete the audios once you finish listening.

Here you can also sync your profile with your evernote account and connect your kindle. The former allows you to save all your highlights in an Evernote notebook and make them searchable. with the second you can send book summaries to your kindle, save them forever and take them anywhere.

As you can see, moving around the application is very easy to do thanks to its structure. Let’s see how it feels to use the main functions: reading and audio.

what are the main features of the blinkist application?

There are really only two use cases for the blinkist application: reading summaries and listening to them. but what does that look and feel like?

1. reading book summaries

When you tap on a book within your library, you’ll see a brief description along with the option to read or listen to it. if you tap on “read”, you will be taken to the first “blink”, which is what blinkist calls its summary pages. describes what you can get by reading the summary.

then you can slide your finger from one highlighted key to the next. you’ll see a progress bar at the bottom and you can highlight any part of the text that speaks to you. there’s also a table of contents, a toggle to adjust the font size or switch to white-on-black mode (instead of the default black-on-white), and a button to quickly switch to audio mode.

Between blinks, you’ll sometimes see nuggets of wisdom from the book, which is a nice treat. the last blink is always a summary with some practical advice. then you can mark the title as done and return to your library. easy!

2. listen to summaries of audiobooks

When you press “listen” in the book overview, you will go to the audio player. the blinks for that book will now play one after another until you’ve finished the entire summary.

You can also enable autoplay at the bottom of the screen, which will proceed to play all the books in your library in a row. if you swipe left, you can also change the order of the books in your queue. When you enable “offline mode”, the app will only play audios that you have previously downloaded.

The audio player itself is very easy to understand. the key conclusion of each blink is shown in the middle and the controls allow you to jump 15 seconds forward and backward, as well as speed up or slow down. the minimum is half as fast, the maximum is twice as fast. that’s it, plain and simple, like using spotify or your phone’s standard music player!

summary: blinkist user experience

blinkist really wants to save you some time. you can feel it the design is very minimalistic, and that’s on purpose. everything is concise and to the point. they don’t give you many options and that’s good.

In fact, they have removed several features from previous versions and I think it serves a purpose. blinkist wants you to focus on one thing: learning from books by reading and listening.

That’s why there are no cluttered sidebars, no fancy buttons, no ads. the user interface reminds me of medium. is extremely focused on giving you the best possible reading and listening experience. nothing more, nothing less.

This also means that navigation is easy, you can hardly do anything wrong or go somewhere you don’t want to be within the app. Load times are fast, both on the phone and in the web app, and thanks to offline reading and downloading of audio, you don’t even need an internet connection at all times.

so much for the user experience. Now let’s talk about the pros and cons.

what are the pros & cons of the blinkist app specifically?

Now that you know how it feels to use the app, let’s talk about some of its pros and cons. again, remember that all book summaries have pros and cons, but these are specific to the blinkist service:

advantages of using the blinkist application:

book summaries are complete. you don’t get just a few important ideas or concepts from a book, you get them all.
it’s very easy consume content and learn. the app is easy to use, convenient to navigate, and a child could figure out how to access the main features, reading and listening, in a matter of minutes.
highlighting helps a lot to remember facts from summaries. this is an underrated feature as it can make a big difference in the amount of information you retain, but you should also use it to reap the benefits.
the flickering audio experience it is perfect. touch, sound, listen. perfect for learning during long workouts, your commute, or while cooking or cleaning your house.

cons of using the blinkist app:

Humor and most emotion are almost completely removed from the book. Some writers take pains to capture some of the book’s unique spirit in their summary. blinkist doesn’t, it’s very fact oriented.
reading many summaries in a row can feel repetitive and boring. that’s mainly due to the lack of story, and that’s why that I would recommend reading 1-2 summaries a day, no more.
some summaries are too short for the book they represent. I have found summaries that only had three or four blinks, but the actual book was very long. I suspect a lot of important points will be missed.
There is no scrutiny of the individual books. The blinkist team does not review, critique, rate, or verify any of the books. that means these jobs are still yours.

I’ll give you my final thoughts on how these compare to each other at the end of this review, but for now, I’ll let you be the judge.

Next, let’s look at some of the content itself so we can get an idea of how useful the service could be to you.

what are the best books on blinkist?

The best way to familiarize yourself with the content of blinkist is to read today’s free summary. you can also listen to the audio. you will find both here. With that said, here are 10 of the most popular blinkist titles of all time so you can see what kind of books they have:

the 7 habits of highly effective people by stephen r. covey. This all-time classic outlines seven habits the most successful people share and how to build them in your own life.
getting things done by david allen. the default manifesto on productivity. a simple system with some hard and fast rules to help you do your job.
thinking, fast and slow by daniel kahneman. In this book, he will learn about cognitive biases and how they shape, and sometimes distort, our perceptions and decisions.
The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg. this is one of the best habit making and breaking books out there. thanks to duhigg’s habit cycle, you can identify and change your behavior the way you want.
tim ferriss’s 4-hour workweek. If you want to be an entrepreneur, this is for you. Tim describes how he built, automated, and then even sold his company. More importantly, it gives you the tools and tactics to create your own in a way that finances your lifestyle without taking too much time.
influenced by robert cialdini. one of the best books on how to interact and build relationships with other people. You can use this book to find friends, get a promotion, or make a commitment to your spouse.
Drive by Daniel Pink. pink dissects what makes us tick, which is really helpful for finding the job you love.
malcolm gladwell outliers. By looking at a few extreme cases, Gladwell is able to offer a template for why products, ideas, and people are successful—or not.
carol dweck’s mindset. There are two main ways to see the world: you can try to learn from everything (a growth mindset) or accept everything as it is (a fixed mindset). dweck helps us go from one to another.
flow by mihaly csikszentmihalyi. one of the best books on creativity and happiness. it explains why we enjoy the activities we do and helps us do more of them.

If you sign up for a 7-day free trial, you can read all of the above. You can also take a look at their content by reading their free four-minute book summaries. you can find them all in our book summaries index.

Recap: How useful is the blinkist app?

blinkist has over 5,500 books in its database. the selection is also growing at about 40 books per month. that’s a veritable buffet of book summaries of everything you can read. Whether you want to learn about growth hacking, stoicism, economics, entrepreneurship, habits, mindfulness, happiness, love, biology, history, or food, you’ll find the right book.

also, thanks to removing the fluff, but giving you all the important ideas of a book, blinkist also allows you to decide what you want to learn from a book and how much. you can get just the main concept of a book as one thing, or explore all the blinks and see how many sound new to you. if you find a lot of interesting things, you can still buy the book. if not, you can end it or come back to it later.

Blinkist’s purpose is to give you a factual analysis of a book’s central message, along with all of its important points. And it really delivers on that promise. so you can use blinkist as a companion and complement to the books. Get the best ideas of books that aren’t worth reading in their entirety and evaluate the best ones before committing to them.

Okay, time to talk about money. How expensive is this service?

how much does blinkist cost?

First, the blinkist application is free to download and install. but with a free account, you can only read one summary each day: the daily selection. this is a randomly chosen set of blinks, so you can’t control what you’re reading. full access requires a premium subscription.

blinkist offers a monthly and an annual plan.

for $12.99 a month (or the same amount in €, if you’re in Europe), you get unlimited access to their content. including over 5,000 titles, including audio versions, summaries (podcast highlights), offline reading and downloading, highlighting, as well as the ability to sync your highlights with Evernote or send highlights directly to your kindle. that’s less than $0.50 a day and pretty cheap when you consider the “skill” you get in return. but wait!

On the annual plan, you get a 50% discount, which means you pay only $6.67 (or €) per month. that’s a big discount. even if you only use the app for six months, it will have paid for itself. Can there be anything better? actually, yes, you can.

four minute books is a blinkist affiliate, which means we can give you another 35% off if you use our link. In return, we will receive a commission for referring you to blinkist as a customer. In the end, you’ll only pay $5.34 per month, less than $0.18 per day!

how much does blinkist offer compared to other book summary services?

Broadly speaking, there are two types of book summary services.

First, there are those who offer free book summaries, like we do in four minute books. this usually means that the affiliate links to the actual books are included in the content. often it’s just one or a few people who manage the site and share their notes.

Second, there are paid book summary services, such as blinkist. these charge you per abstract or you will have to pay a monthly fee to access all of their titles. content in various formats will typically be created by a team.

Let’s look at some of the most popular in both categories and how they compare to blinkist.

blinkist alternatives: free book summary services

optimize for heroic. brian johnson used to run optimize.me as a paid service. more than 250,000 people use it. however, he recently raised money, converted his company to a b-corp (a for-profit public benefit corporation), and made the app free. before, it used to cost ~$100/year. optimize offers over 600 philosophical notes, 6 page structured pdf files of some of the world’s best titles. It also includes audios, videos and much more. great free book summary app!
power moves. lucio is incredibly dedicated to objectivity and posting quality content. I didn’t count the number of summaries on their list, but it seems to be the only free one to rival our nearly 500 titles.
njlifehacks. nils and jonas are great and positive guys and they put a lot of effort into writing. they even create custom images for your summaries. incredible!
practical books. With over 1,000 summaries, this is technically the largest list, but the articles don’t look like summaries. everyone shares just one great idea and then two more random ideas. I am not convinced of this structure. I know our own 3-lesson format is sometimes limited, but this is even more so.
james clear. King James hardly needs an introduction. he is one of the most prolific researchers and writers on the science of habits. He has summed up many popular books in 3 sentences.
Sam Thomas Davies. I have known Sam for years and he breaks down the psychology of our brains like no other. He also has over 100 book summaries that he has organized neatly by category.
Nat Eliason. Nat is one of the great experimenters of our time, covering everything from health to technology to sex to entrepreneurship. his book notes are more like highlights, but combined with his ratings they are very helpful.
derek sivers. After selling his business, Derek now lives a quiet life as a thinker, writer, developer, musician, and whatever else he wants to be. he also has notes on more than 250 books. respect!

Other free services, like spark notes, cliffnotes, and wikisummaries, are more concerned with textbooks and classic literature, to help you study for school.

Keeping in mind that you only get one summary per day as a free blinkist user, many other services offer much more free content. at the same time, these services rarely provide summaries as comprehensive or detailed as blinkist’s, precisely because they are free. They also often have less content overall, as blinkist’s 60-plus team can post far more summaries than any one or two person blog.

if you only read a few summaries a month or don’t mind the randomness of blinkist’s daily selection, free may do the trick. but if you want more, a paid service is the way to go to follow.

alternative blinkist: paid book summary services

advance. this is a relatively new app, offering short learning in a variety of formats. They only launched in 2019, but they already boast over 12 million users, making them a serious blinker contender. Using a combination of quotes, summaries, audio, and graphics, they make it very easy for you to make learning a habit. at $90/year, it costs about the same as blinkist.
short form. A few years ago, I saw a guy named Allen Cheng post incredibly detailed book summaries on his blog. now his work has become the basis for shortform, a large-scale book summaries service that attempts to offer the most detailed, chapter-by-chapter book summaries of all.
insta read. another solid competitor to blinkist with over 2,000 abridged books, a slick looking app and format, and a good level of depth and storytelling in its content. It’s also the same price as blinkist, and it has some cool perks like swiping left and right on book quotes. read our full review here.
getabstract. With over 18,000 books, this is probably the world’s largest book summary service. they have a great deal for students (free for one year, then €59/year), but regular professional and business licenses are really expensive (€299 and up per year). you can read our detailed review of them here.
uptime. This app offers 5-minute knowledge tips for books, courses, documentaries, and even podcasts in extremely creative reading, listening, and viewing formats. start from just $4/month! read our detailed review here.
readitfor.me. this service is more geared towards busy professionals with its 12-minute video and audio summaries. it’s also $19/month, or $29/month if you want access to their masterclasses.
flashbooks. I’m not sure how many summaries this service has, but at $29/mo after a $1 week trial, it’s definitely expensive.
chart reading. this service takes a more visual approach to reading with infographics for each book. however, for $19/month you only get 3 new summaries, which is a high price per piece of content.
scribd. scribd aggregates and summarizes all kinds of content, from audiobooks to books, magazines, and research papers. they also usually host full version pdf files of the originals. you can read our detailed review here.

My friend Prakhar created a long list of more services and tools, but I think these are the most relevant. if you ask me, instaread and getabstract are the best alternatives to blinkist, as they are similar in price to value, albeit slightly more expensive, not taking into account any discounts. optimize is probably the best free alternative.

if you want to learn from several books a week or even a day, I think blinkist offers the best value for money.

summary: is blinkist worth it?

To find out if you should pay for a subscription, I like this thought experiment:

Imagine that you can buy the ability to be able to read a book every day. just like in the matrix, it is uploaded directly into your brain. How much would that skill be worth to you? $1,000? $10,000? $100,000? whatever your number is, that’s what blinkist should be worth to you.

because with a blinkist premium subscription, you basically acquire this skill overnight. Instead of wasting a lot of time on bad books and procrastinating, you’ll read a series of blinks and digest all the main ideas of an entire book in 15 to 20 minutes. meanwhile, universities charge $200,000 for a degree that hardly teaches you anything.

In my city, munich in germany, some cafes charge $7 or more for a single cappuccino or latte. however, for less than that, I can get a full month of access to over 5,000 book and audio summaries, all designed to do one thing: make me smarter.

At $0.18/day, I pay ten times more for my daily coffee. maybe you are too. If that’s not a no-brainer, I don’t know what is.

Thanks to blinkist, you’ll save a lot of time, be able to learn in situations where you normally couldn’t, remember more, and absorb new knowledge faster. the pros easily outweigh the cons. Given that it’s the cheapest book summary service in absolute terms and offers excellent value for money, I think blinkist is worth paying for.

conclusion: my review of blinkist

Let’s briefly recap each section.

First, the user experience within the blinkist app is brilliant. It loads fast, the minimalist design is easy to understand, it syncs across all your devices, and you can always pick up where you left off. . the app gently guides you through its only two real-world use cases: reading and listening to book summaries.

Secondly, the blinkist application is extremely useful and its benefits outweigh its drawbacks. Sure, summaries are mostly based on facts and some of them aren’t perfect, but because they’re complete, you can pick up tons of ideas in no time. Since the reading and listening experience is seamless, you will also remember a lot of what you read.

Third, blinkist offers great value for money and is the cheapest book summary service in absolute terms. With over 5000 summaries in its library and a price of only 0.18 $ a day, blinkist outshines most of the competition. they have more content than most free roundup sites and are cheaper than all other paid services. but even judged on its own, it’s an investment in yourself that you won’t regret.

here’s my final verdict: use blinkist as an extension to your regular reading and a complement, not a replacement.

You can skip the book fluff with just a few good ideas, learn via audio in situations where you can’t read a book, and check out great titles before committing to reading them all. That’s what this app is perfect for. reading 1-2 summaries a day will also greatly speed up your overall learning. I recommend that you register.

Whatever you do, I appreciate you reading this review, and I hope the four-minute books help you become smarter.

other reviews

Looking for our other reviews of the most popular book digest apps, tools, and services? Here’s a list of all the reviews we’ve published so far:

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