Is Readwise Worth It? – Overpriced or Valuable Investment

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What is Readwise?

You might have heard of Readwise from a lot of the productivity and techy people on YouTube in the past few months. Readwise has been around since 2017 but has gained a little more traction recently due to the release of their new article reader app “Reader” (clever name I know). The initial goal of Readwise was to combine your notes and highlights from various sources into one place and for those notes and highlights to then be brought back to you in regular intervals to help you remember them. Now it does a bit more than that. I’m going to tell you whether Readwise is worth it.

Is it Free?

No, Readwise is sadly not free. For the full Readwise package, including access to their new “Reader” app, they’re charging $7.99. Now I first stumbled onto Readwise probably around year ago and as far as I can remember their pricing was around the same. Considering you now get access to an entire new application which is probably the best part of Readwise right now, back in the day that $7.99 was looking a bit pricey but now it looks a bit more tempting. I decided to commit to their monthly fee quite recently and so here’s my honest opinion on whether that was a good invesetment or not and whether I think Readwise is worth it.

The Original Readwise

Articles In

Okay so Readwise itself. Simple concept, pretty nifty little tool that does exactly what it sets out to do. I’ve got notes and highlights coming from my Amazon Kindle (for books), Reader (for articles/videos), Goodreads (for bonus book highlights from other people), Snipd (for podcasts) and Twitter (for tweets surprisingly). Not a huge amount of sources but enough that I think I’ve currently got around 550 highlights.

Each import source works pretty flawlessly aside from the odd time I’ve had to sign back into one of the accounts to get my highlights to sync. All of the highlights are now stored in Readwise with authors and dates etc etc… with a consistent formatting.

Now that’s all well and good. But what do you do with these highlights now that Readwise has them. The standard option once Readwise got their mitts on your higlights was a daily email from them which surfaced 5 (by default) of your highlights for your re-consumption. Now I personally only check my emails once every couple of days so I would rarely ever see this email. So instead I’ve opted for a simple notification on my phone to open the Readwise app where I can read through these 5 highlights. There’s even a streak counter that resets if you miss a day. A a nice little motivation to actually do your Readwise. If you miss a day it’s not a disaster though. Although the streak will reset to 0 if you tap the streak icon you’ll be shown the days that you missed. If they were within the past 7 days you will have the opportunity to catch up on missed days and recover your streak which is nice.

Articles Out

The real nice feature of Readwise though is the Exports section. So Readwise has all these highlights nicely piled into one place. But it’s not that pretty of an app and it’s fairly limited in it’s functionality so where else could those highlights be put to use. The answer at the top of my list for that question was Notion. The databases system that Notion uses is perfect for Readwise and the functionality that Notion offers pair perfectly with Readwise. So pop your Notion login into Readwise and tell it where you want the Readwise database to be created. As if by magic there’s your highlights in a big fancy Notion database with custom views and icons and everything. A very nice feature indeed.

As you can see Readwise creates a very neat little database with views that show only specific types of highlights. Even if this isn’t enough for you. Once Readwise has made your database you can edit the format however you like (to a certain extent). For instance I’ve called mine content storage and have modified some of the views to be galleries instead of lists. Honestly I was almost sold on Readwise being worth it on this feature alone.

The Future of Readwise

Now for $7.99 the aforementioned features that Readwise offers were kinda nice. But nothing groundbreaking. But they could charge that because they had no competition. And as far as I can telll they still don’t. But now, your $7.99 goes a bit further. There new Reader app is extremely good. And it’s still extremely new. I’ve tried apps like Pocket and Instapaper and Raindrop.io and they were alright but always just seemed a bit limited. But Reader is the best implementation of a reading application I’ve tried so far. It even lets you take highights from YouTube videos while the video is playing.

The Feed

I never really knew where to read interesting articles. Like you can’t exactly Google “interesting articles” and expect to find something that fits your criteria of interesting but Reader has a solution. The feed. The default storage location for articles in Reader is the library. This is a more long term structured location for notes and articles whereas the feed is like a social media feed of interesting stuff you might want to read. It starts off empty but all you have to do is either search for new feed sources thorugh Reader itself or use the Reader email address they give you to subscribe Reader to some newsletters that you like. Now these newsletters go straight to Reader and into the feed. And anything that you choose to read from the feed can be highlighted and added to your library.

What makes Reader just so good for it’s exact purpose, reading, is the way in which you can highlight. It aims to be as frictionless as possible. A double tap on a paragraph will highlight the entire thing. Which at first I was like that’s silly because when do I ever highight an entire paragraph like that. But after a while, as it turns out, I do in fact highlight the entire section that Readwise covers which makes the process that much quicker.

Reader to Readwise

And of course, Reader would be completely useless without working alongside Readwise itself. So all the highlights you make in Reader automatically get synced over to Readwise and appear in the daily highlights that Readwise sends you. Nice right? And of course becasue they’re in Readwise those highlights also get sent to Notion. Even nicer right? It really does just take all the pain out of reading and storing notes. Considering I was almost sold just with a Notion integration, Readwise is almost entirely worth it with the new Reader app. It’s really the cherry on top of the cake.