How many books are collecting dust on your shelf, waiting for the day when you finally have time for them? If you can't see yourself reading them any time soon, then you may prefer this option: cheat and read summaries instead.
Blinkist summarizes the key messages from books into 15 minutes of reading time. The app's library contains more than 4,000 titles in English in 27 categories, including health, culture, economics, love, sex and technology.
If you don't find the right book for you, you can enter the desired title in the search bar and make your own suggestion to the curator team. Around 25 new titles are added every week.
Each book summary is divided into short chapters called blinks. A blink consists of a meaningful headline and five to seven short paragraphs. The summary ends with a statement of the core content and suggests further reading.
If you use the paid option, you can also listen to most Blinks as audio. This usually takes no longer than 2-4 minutes per blink. Human readers are sometimes used and other times computer voices.
The content can be read using browsers or with the Blinkist app on smartphones and tablets. You can also download blinks to read offline. For those who want to read or listen to blinks in bed at night, the app has a dark mode and a sleep timer.
If you sign up for a free account with Blinkist, you will receive a daily summary of a book, although you have no say in the selection.
For unrestricted access to all summaries, a paid subscription for at least one month is required. At the time of publication, this is €6.67/$7.50 per month or €79.99/$90 for an annual subscription.
Is it worth it? Blinkist is easy to use and offers a user-friendly interface that’s simple to navigate. The blinks are created by a team of authors and editors who read the book and filter out the key messages. The app is also currently experimenting with various AI tools to help create the summaries.
Of course summarizing content and filtering out the important parts from texts is something that many AI bots can do these days. However, this requires first getting the book or other content and asking the bot for a summary.
That’s where an app like Blinkist has an advantage: it can summarize physical books. On the other hand, you have to depend on whatever books the curators decide is important.
Even so, Blinkist can be a useful tool for those who want to educate themselves and stay up to date on various topics without having the time to read lots of books.