Show HN: Readwise Reader, an all-in-one reading app | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Readwise Reader, an all-in-one reading app

readwise.io

326 pointstristanho156 comments

Hey HN, cofounder of Readwise here. We've been working on this cross-platform reader app for about 2 years, excited to finally share it in public beta.

Probably the most notable thing that makes Reader unique is that it supports almost any content type you could want to save/read/highlight:

* web pages

* emails/newsletters

* PDFs

* ePubs

* twitter threads

* youtube videos (with transcripts)

* RSS feeds

With all of your knowledge content in one place, we built powerful reading and highlighting, as well as a bunch of novel triage/organization features, so you can actually consume & stay on top of that content!

There are also a lot of advanced features too, such as text-to-speech, GPT3 questions/summaries, super powerful highlighting (that includes markup and images), complex filtering/search (with our own query language), sleek mobile triage UI, keyboard shortcuts for reading/everything, integrations with note-taking apps, a browser extension for both saving pages and highlighting them, and much more.

If anyone's interested in more product details, as well as our business model, etc, we wrote a detailed launch post: https://blog.readwise.io/the-next-chapter-of-reader-public-b...

Predicting a common question: Reader is part of the Readwise subscription pricing right now in beta -- there's a 30 day free trial and then it's paid at ~$8usd/month. We also promise to not raise this price for existing subscribers.

Reader is also fairly technically interesting -- our iOS, Android and webapp all work fully offline and sync your reading data/progress with eachother. Our search on web is built with wasm sqlite. We have a fairly intense pipeline for cleaning web articles (removing ads/styling). We share lot of modules around syncing/highlighting across all platforms, etc...

Happy to answer any questions :)

Open articleView on HN

Looks like a great product but you're using Facebook Remarketing and Google Ads. That makes me not want to use an app with potentially very personal information. Let's say I save 100s of articles about a specific health problem. Having any of that info going to Meta scares me.

We definitely do not share reading data with meta or google.

Honestly we installed those a while back when experimenting with ads, but dont use them anymore… will look at ripping out!

> We definitely do not share reading data with meta or google.

At the moment. It seems like your privacy policies allow you to change that in the future. Either you or a company you sell out to in ten years...

> Either you or a company you sell out to in ten years...

Has Readwise in particular done anything specific to garner your skepticism here, or is this just general HN distrust of the longevity of third-party services?

From my own limited exposure to their team and philosophy [1], it seems like they are genuinely passionate about their problem space, and intent on building for the long-term.

[1] https://blog.readwise.io/why-were-bootstrapping-readwise/

Yeah, I'd recommend that everyone check their privacy policy very carefully. This seems like yet another service where you are the product being delivered.

This is simply not true. We not sell user data to anyone at all. The business is _entirely_ funded through customer subscriptions.

> We not sell user data to anyone at all. The business is _entirely_ funded through customer subscriptions.

The privacy policy says that you "share" data with advertisers and publishers. In a privacy policy, the word "share" most often means "sell", or perhaps your service really is different and the data you're "sharing" with advertisers and publishers is being done for free? Out of kindness?

Third parties that your privacy policy explicitly mentions will collect data are Facebook, Amazon, Google, and Mixpanel. These companies are notorious for being highly risky when it comes to privacy concerns. Your page on the play store says "No data shared with third parties" which clearly doesn't tell the whole story.

Look, lots of people are perfectly happy with surveillance capitalism. I'm just saying people should take time to read your policies to see if there's anything in there that might make them uncomfortable.

Yes, we do use common third party apps for analytics/ads. We do not share personal reading data with them. Amazon is just used for their Oauth login API for example (for an easy sign in flow for users), and mixpanel is a very common analytics library that we use to understand product usage, but it does not get reading data either.

You also omitted the term "non-identifying and aggregate information" in your quote from the policy.

I especially take umbrage to your claim that "you are the product", when again, 100% of our revenue comes from customer subscriptions.

What you're saying is simply not true -- we're a small team of bootstrapped hackers that have worked on improving reading for five years and the lies about us aren't appreciated.

> The privacy policy says we _may_ share _anonymized_ reading data, aggregated across many users. Even that, we have never done, but needed to have in the policy to cover our asses legally.

Why would you legally need to specify that you might send data to advertisers and publishers? Even the examples you provided like "We may tell an advertiser or publisher that X number of people imported Z annotations from a particular book." suggests that even if you haven't done it already, you anticipate selling data to publishers and advertisers about what people are reading.

That's not a bad thing, in fact it's exactly the sort of thing I'd expect from a service like this (along with making recommendations to users based on their reading history), but it seems weird to dismiss that as something you only put in there for legal CYA reasons.

Please understand the position I'm in. I have no way to know if you've sold data to advertisers and publishers. I can only know what you tell me that you do, or "may" do, in your privacy policy (in context of a privacy policy "may" should be assumed to mean "will").

You may actually be the most privacy respecting SaaS company that has ever existed, who never has and never will make a single dime on anything but subscription fees. I can't know that. I can only go by what your privacy policy says. To me, that policy makes your service look like it will capitalize on the data you collect from your users and that it depends on third parties like amazon, google, facebook, and mixpanel for things that you consider to be essential to your service. Your privacy policy says that you may share anonymized data, yet anonymized data is often trivial to deanonymize, and even aggregated data is not always sufficient to protect people's privacy.

From the information that I have, my assessment is that it's reasonable to expect that in addition to subscription fees my interactions with your service will likely be used to generate profit for you.

If that's wrong today, then I'm happy to have been wrong about that. If you never intend to make a single penny from anything other than subscription fees and you have carefully taken every precaution to the point where you can ensure that user's reading lists and interests couldn't, in any way, be revealed to third parties like Google, Amazon, or Mixpanel then I sincerely apologize for by assumptions, and I'd suggest that you could do a lot more to make that clearer in the information you provide. I'd even open with your intentions to only accept money from subscription fees in your privacy policy.

A reason I won't use a SaaS for my data is that even if today the policy is that they do not sell my data, tomorrow they might change their policy to do just that. Even if I stop using it before that change, they already have my data and are unlikely to allow me to completely delete it.

> are unlikely to allow me to completely delete it

They're legally obliged to do so for European customers, if requested, no? They'll lose a lot of customers if they don't support deleting all data.

It's unclear from their terms if Readwise deletes all your data. I found no mention of the GDPR or an easy place to request a GDPR right to be forgotten request.

To their credit, they do mention "You shall have the ability to delete your Account at any time at https://readwise.io/delete." in their terms, but that page is behind an account login (so I can't see what it says unless I already agree to this term). Does account mean login credentials or all data? That's not clear to me up front.

In theory, yes. In practice it seems this might be, once again, relatively easy to avoid or restrict. Simply put up identification barriers that are so high none but the most determined pursue this.

"Oh, so you want [a copy of your data/to delete all your data]? Please prove you are who you claim to be, first."

This is at least the impression I got in general. Not saying Readwise would necessarily do that.

Sorry. Most people here can tell that you simply make money by selling a reading and highlight management service. Unfortunately it gets tiring to repeatedly reply to things with "we understand what you are doing, carry on," so we're a silent majority. Obviously the other user that replied to you has no intention of buying your product, no matter what your privacy policy says.

Congratulations on the launch; the reader app looks ambitious and I hope you will keep building on it and improving it. Thanks for posting it here.

This is such a weird comment to read on hackernews. I miss the product/new app oriented community that HN once was.

I don't think it's that weird, a lot of us are especially concerned with privacy and security.

It's not genuine concern, in this case. If someone were interested in privacy, they would be better at understanding when a paid SaaS has boilerplate in their privacy policy and why they might use analytics.

You shouldn't have boilerplate in a policy. It's easy enough to find a dozen sites (Shopify, termly.io, etc.) that will generate a tailored policy for you based on your intentions.

Indeed. I typically point companies to the aptly named https://www.privacypolicies.com which I’ve found to be configurable enough for most. There are productized legal consultations available, too.

As someone who also understands the challenges of guiding a business through implementing finely tailored privacy policies, you’re in a position to read between the lines and empathize when you a see a business that collects and uses data more minimally than their policy claims.

It is weird that you think even hn user should not be the group to be privacy oriented. I definitely don't prefer that future.

Product Hunt dot com is the place to be if you want all smiles, back-patting and no awkward questions.

These are the forbidden realms where one can have the temerity to task "why would anyone use this over rsync?"

Looks amazing! I played with Reader for the last hour or so and it looks so much better than Pocket. The import from Pocket - delightful!

I had originally started using Readwise to sync my Pocket and Memex highlights with Roam and it looks like you guys have removed the need for both by building Reader.

My pocket (pun unintended) thanks you, provided price isn't going up. But I think there is a lesson here. Pocket has done no innovation for years - a classic 'cash cow'. But then you guys show up and make a product that (for me) is 10x better. It is also clever that you haven't taken any VC funding because I don't think this a product that will ever be venture scale. Now, you guys can build cool stuff and make a good living in peace without chasing that elusive venture exit.

Yeah, if I ran Pocket I'd be really concerned now-- particularly because they've made it so easy to onboard as a Pocket user, with it automatically retrieving all your saved articles.

It’s Mozilla right? I’m not sure how much money they make off pocket but I imagine that it’s no where near as much as keeping that google money flowing.

That being said, I imagine every bit counts for Mozilla. Anybody have any idea how big their user base is?

https://uk.pcmag.com/suites/128195/mozilla-signs-lucrative-3...

Thanks! Yeah, part of the motivation for Reader was that our original readwise app was integrated with a bunch of these apps like Pocket and Instapaper... and we saw them completely fall by the wayside.

Our users were constantly asking us to fix things with Pocket/Instapaper that were out of our control, so they kind of pulled this app out of us :)

Been using Reader as my primary reading + save for later app for a few months. It's truly a joy — it's fast, simple, and works really well. There's obviously a cold-start problem where you need to use it for a bit to get most of the value, so I'd encourage anyone here that's interested in a similar app to give it a couple weeks.

Exact same experience for me. They’ve done a great job of combining all the disparate parts of the digital reading experience and it’s only been getting better over the months since the devs are extremely responsive to feedback and they implement changes quickly.

I use the Readwise sync service and pocket and just checked out the app.

My _several hundred_ pocket articles all moved over seamlessly! Very impressed so far!

Hoping this can replace pocket and my ereader.

I got it a week ago and was hooked within a day.

The things I like:

- easy to send articles to it (with or without highlights) from any platform I use (Android, iOS, Chrome), or by forwarding emails, or by subscribing to mailing lists using the reader email address

- nice way to read Twitter threads

- nice workflow for creating flashcards from highlights

- keyboard shortcuts on web

- reading feels immersive, and choose a next article is easy

I am usually reluctant to add yet another monthly subscription, but this is so nice that I paid for an annual subscription a couple of hours after I started using it.

With all the hype by authors, it is very poorly designed website, app frontend and documentation. I still cannot figure out how to use this thing. I installed the app and app has look of circa 2007. No help pages, how-to steps, guide or anything of value can be found. I go to Twitter and Safari on my phone and have no clue how do I bookmark/save anything to Readwise. Nothing on iPhone or Twitter shows "save to Readwise" or anything like that. Their webpage is just filled entirely with marketing fluff instead of actual user centric how-to content. At lease tell users how to use all the functionality you are relentlessly bragging about!!

The main thing in bookmark/offline readers is ability to search. I see tons of bragging on highlights and not much on search. Can I search by tags? How can I tag anything any way? Can I import my tags from places like Diigo? My primary question is always "where did I saw that?", not highlighting everything I read.

I use Diigo and they are almost opposite for the better. Solid and clear way of how to migrate from competitors should also be #1 focus but here basic stuff is missing.

Hey Sytelus, it sounds like you might have installed the wrong app. You’re describing our classic “Readwise 1.0” app, which admittedly could use some design work! (and of course is not a bookmark/reader app)

This post refers to our new Reader app, which you can install here on mobile:

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/readwise-reader/id1567599761

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.readermobi...

Used Pocket for ~10 years, and I know Readwise is superior.

Here's the issue I had with Pocket, and one I'm sure you will run into as well. Around 2018 or so, I noticed Pocket stopped going to the offline version of the article, and would load the awful full web page, with ads and popups and everything. I would have to keep my phone in airplane mode to force Pocket to default to the offline article. I imagine they did this due to complaints from site owners.

Pocket at its peak probably had millions of users more than Readwise does. How will you handle similar requests when you reach that kind of scale?

FYI, my system now is to simply "save to PDF" in a labeled folder and keep devices in sync with Syncthing Fork.

It depends on the site; I've actually had good rapport with Pocket's team on bringing up sites that don't work, and getting them fixed.

In my case, there was no issue with the sites. Pocket could archive them in offline mode just fine. It would just choose to send me to the online version, if it detected a network connection.

It wasn't a technical glitch, more like a dark pattern IMO.

I have been using Reader for months and it has been great. I love that it can handle adhoc content like PDFs and also subscriptions like RSS and mailing lists.

The killer feature is exporting highlights to Obsidian for me though. I get a lot of utility from being able to find things I read in the past while doing writing or research.

whoa, good flag! need to start doing this

I'm super intrigued by this, and feel like I'm 99% overlap in a Venn diagram with the target user, BUT… when the browser plugin immediately requested the ability to see everything I did on every site I ever visited (and the first one it asked me about was my employer's wiki with trade secrets galore), I clicked "deny" and moved on.

Might still be worth a shot on personal devices, but with the say Safari syncs history across devices via iCloud, I'm not so sure…

Is it still demonstrably better than other reading apps (Reeder, Instapaper, etc.) without the plugin?

I use the bookmarklet they offer for saving for this reason. I wish addons had a finer grain permission system.

Where is the bookmarklet? I'm not using the browser extension for privacy purposes as well, but can't find the bookmarklet

Cant find it for the life of me. Here is the code.

    javascript:(function()%7Bopen('https://readwise.io/save?title='+encodeURIComponent(document.title)+'&url='+encodeURIComponent(location.href))%7D)()

I suppose this means that things that need a login to read won't be saved whereas with the extension it would be?

Oh damn :/ that indeed sounds like a blocker for me. I was looking forward to try that app.

EDIT: looks like there’s a bookmarklet. I think that’ll do the trick.

They should be using the "activeTab" permission available in both Manifest v2 and v3 https://developer.chrome.com/docs/extensions/mv3/manifest/ac...

@tristanho - will you consider this?

Unfortunately, there was no way to make the _full_ extension work with only activeTab, as we have some functionality that is incompatible (one such example: if you open up a page you've previously saved and highlighted in Reader, we show your highlights overlaid on it seamlessly).

That being said, we do want to make another version of the extension that works for more privacy conscious folks, and will defs use activeTab for that! Just requires a little more engineering effort.

I totally understand the request though, privacy is super important. All extension data stays local on your device unless you actively press the extension button to save a page/content. You'd have to read our source code and network requests to confirm this right now, of course.

Hey! Totally understand this concern with the browser extension. I mentioned this in another comment, but there was no way to build the full functionality without these permissions, though we do hope to make a lighter version of the extension in the future for more privacy-conscious folks.

However, completely understand the request, and we do value privacy/security super highly. All extension data stays local on your device unless you actively press the extension button to save a page/content. You'd have to read our source code and network requests to confirm this right now, of course.

Another commenter also mentioned, we do indeed have a super light bookmarklet that can serve this purpose in the mean time as well

``` javascript:(function()%7Bopen('https://readwise.io/save?title='+encodeURIComponent(document...)() ```

Hope that helps!

Paradoxically, the fact that this is a do-everything app makes me much less likely to try it out. If it were just, say, an RSS reader, then I might try exporting OPML from my current feed reader and seeing what happens. But reading is important enough to me that I would be very reluctant to put all my eggs in one basket. Especially a startup, where the best case is that a lot of my most important stuff requires me to pay $100/year forever.

I agree. Subscription-based proprietary software is the worst kind out there in terms of user autonomy, because there exists a strong incentive against your ability to leave the service in order to keep you paying. The larger the scope, the greater my potential loss I face.

I migrated to Reader from Instapaper, which was crashing all the time, so I had little to lose. Before that, my company used Diigo, which felt clunky and unloved. Reader is incredibly polished. I absolutely love it, and I’m delighted when they add new features. I’ve been on the beta for 11 months, and am genuinely excited to read the updates. They launched YouTube support a few days ago, and already it’s great (on desktop). I also love being able to add tweet threads (effectively turning them into articles I can highlight). Reader has a feature that automatically subscribes to RSS feeds you like (based on your reading and highlighting history) and, for me, it was at least as surprisingly effective as the recommendation engines in Spotify and Amazon.

Even though I imagine it’s hard to create software like this, I don’t believe it’s beyond one company to make a do-everything app. Already, it’s do-enough-for-my-needs, and their velocity is impressive. (I want them to add podcasts next, with highlightable transcripts. That sounds easy to me, but every podcast-workflow app I’ve tried has been buggy/crashy/awful.)

Since you apparently use the RSS feature could you explain how it works / what it does?

My primary use case is tracking serials update and shoving the rss target (not the feed itself as that’s rarely complete) into an offline reader. Is this able to load tte feed into its own timeline on its own without user intervention?

Still waiting for a solution like what you have done with YouTube videos but for podcasts on the literal run. Easy way to tag a moment in a podcast from an Apple Watch for later review as a transcript I can cite. Best of luck building Readwise Reader, and I loved your post at https://readwise.io/reader/shared/01gewk3j3kt56v6w87qd1qqez1... and have been sharing it with lots of people I know.

I've been experimenting with a new podcast app Snipd, which purports to do this: https://www.snipd.com/

It doesn't yet have an Apple Watch app though, and since (I assume like you) I listen to podcasts while out on a run w/o my phone, that would be the killer feature I'd drop everything for.

Scribd (https://www.scribd.com) îs supposed to also do this. I have downloaded it, and not yet gotten around to trialing it. But honestly I want to give my money to the Readwise team over a large corp if that's an option.

I think the original "read it later" app was "Pocket" 15 years ago. At the core it is still bookmarking with a "reader" mode. I use it on my e-reader (because of the kobo native integration)

I'm looking back to the origins because Readwise is aggressively pushing this concept to the "limits". I mean, offering epubs and RSSs (and much more) is pretty inclusive. This may blur the original "simplicity" goal. However, The UX design is flawless. Nothing to say. So, this will surely help order all that disparate input.

HN readers, don't be discouraged by the price tag. Give it a go, and make sure you "invoke the ghost" [1]

[1] https://twitter.com/deadly_onion/status/1592990487257829376

I remember "Instapaper" being the original "read it later" web app. Found out about Pocket when it was included with firefox and I accidentally clicked on the icon.

Just tried Readwise out - very nice! Pocket seems to have stagnated, so very refreshing to see innovation in the Instapaper/Pocket space. I know you all are working on a ton of things, but one suggestion is to add in other SSO options like Google (gmail). Right now I just see Amazon and Email.

Also when syncing with Pocket, perhaps mention it might take a bit to sync and you'll find the article in your Inbox - I thought the sync didn't work, but eventually appeared under Inbox, as opposed to where I expected in recently added.

Readwise has always been an impressive product - this makes it go so much farther.

Tangent: for me, the Readwise brand as a whole has been damaged by its Twitter bot. There are so many people using it that it spams the replies to just about any Twitter thread. I hate seeing it, but I know these people are getting lots of value - just at the expense of everyone else’s reading experience.

Most of my readwise content is from twitter and I agree this isn't a great UX. I recommend connecting Readwise to your twitter account. Once done, you can bookmark single tweets or save threads by DMing a tweet to the Readwise account w/ the message 'T'.

I opened the link, and my laptop fan started running full blast.

Chrome 108.0.5359.98, MacOS 11.7.1

I opened the Chrome Task Manager and the "GPU Process" was pegging the CPU.

I closed the Readwise tab and CPU usage dropped to normal.

I opened https://readwise.io/read again. After a minute the "GPU Process" CPU usage went back up to 73%.

This looks really great (I'm using the iOS app on an iPad).

I like reviewing long HN threads and would love to save them to read later. However, when I go to a saved thread in Readwise, it only renders the root comment (and none of the replies). I can't find a way to escape the styled view to get to the original. Am I perhaps just missing something or if not, consider it a suggestion!

Heyo! Yeah, our parser doesn't work great with HN threads (yet! i'd love to get it working...)

But in the mean time the Reader browser extension also acts as a web highlighter. So after activating it, you can highlight any text directly on the web page, and then add tags/notes to those as well. Those highlights will sync back into Reader.

Agreed - a way to archive both HN threads and reddit posts + comments would be very useful to me

Was a bit skeptical about how good this was gonna be, but I'm definitely impressed.

The improvements are a lot more apparent on desktop. I love the fact that I can do pretty much anything using the command palette and keyboard shortcuts. Feels like this is the kind of browsing experience that I'm most contend with. The GPT-3 "ghostreader" feature was also great; most of the summary / text generations fulfilled my expectations.

If I have to pick on something: the mobile app browsing experience isn't that much better from Pocket or Instapaper. The scrolling and animation feels a bit laggy in my iPhone. The "ghostreader" feature in the app feels very limited and awkward to enable here as well.

Been using it for a few days now, and my biggest hope is that it gets a dedicated Mac app. I've been a bit disappointed with it so far in Unite. Maybe if I picked up Coherence it would work better?

If I'm going to use an "all in one" reader app it needs to support comics and graphic novels.

$7.99/month

This seems rather steep when there are already reader apps that do cloud bookmarks for free.

Awesome app! Going to dive in and explore a bit more later when I have some time. Can you comment on any portals or forums in which requests for features can be made?

TLDR: do you have plans for an interface to implement your own interactions like in VSCode/Emacs/Vimscript?

I’ve got a to-do item to implement a software artifact that’s hyper-specific to the keyboard configuration I like when it comes to reading, but this app has so many nice features that I can’t help but wonder if I can fit it to my functionality. I’m a big tweaker when it comes to personal software interaction configuration, and I’m curious if your app has any functionality through which to tweak interactions.

An example of something I’ve always wanted: find the first currently visible paragraph break and move the top line of the immediately following paragraph to the top of the view window (similarly, find the last visible paragraph break, and move the last line of the previous paragraph to the bottom of the viewing window). I have lots of little micro-configurations that I hope to implement, and I’m wondering if there’s a route to bring this functionality to your app. Little things like this help to micro-optimize intensive research sessions. Happy to contribute if it’s that sort of project.

The previously-mentioned interactions could be extended to only apply to a single monitor if the window is sized over multiple monitors. I have lots of ideas, and would love to discuss the prospects of accepting community requests and feedback concerning these sorts of personal settings.

Congrats! This is truly a game-changer.

Personally, I have two suggestions for a future release:

1). Invert-color PDF dark mode harms readability.

Simply invert the color will make serif fonts less readable. I use PDF.js with the following canvas renderer snippet to create a more pleasant reading experience.

```css

#viewerContainer > #viewer > .page > .canvasWrapper > canvas { filter: sepia(23%); filter: saturate(45%); filter: hue-rotate(181deg); filter: brightness(90%); filter: contrast(93%); filter: invert(81%); }

#viewerContainer > #viewer > .spread > .page > .canvasWrapper > canvas { filter: sepia(23%); filter: saturate(45%); filter: hue-rotate(181deg); filter: brightness(90%); filter: contrast(93%); filter: invert(81%); }

```

Try this with this PDF.js extension: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/pdf-reader/ieepebp... by pasting it to the option page.

2). Custom Font support.

As a power user, I'd like to render the article with my personally preferable font (locally installed in most cases.) Why not simply give users the option to set css:font-family? It's really easy to implement.

Anyway, the current product is pleasing enough! I'm already spiritually a paid-user.

Thank you!

1) Haha yeah, the inverted colors was kind of a quick hack to make some folks happy. That css looks great -- will definitely explore something like that with our designer :)

2) Not a bad idea at all...

I am a fan.

Been using it for several months now and it’s my default reading location and I read a lot. Reading is essential to my life and work and I have been looking for a solution that solves all my information consumption problems. Readwise has a good chance to be that solution as long as they don’t go the way of Google or Evernote.

One continuing irritation: PDF reading on iPadOS isn’t as good as dedicated apps (I use PDF Expert). Highlighting works fine, but writing by hand using the Pencil is nowhere near as responsive or accurate as PDF Expert. I hope you invest resources into making PDF consumption the best in class - it’s the only thing preventing me from fiully embracing Reader as a complete solution.

A suggestion - not arising from irritation, but a matter of positioning - much of the communication of Readwise/Reader’s utility is around productivity, of reading to optimize information uptake or insight maximization. I would prefer if it also highlighted creativity and imagination. I read to make new connnections and (hopefully) think new thoughts that I haven’t thought before. It’s an idyllic vision of the vocation of reading but one that has a long history in the annals of bibliophilia. Perhaps you should target not just the Tech Bro, but also the Romantic Reader.

PS: an unexpected delight - I liked how I was onboarded by an existing user and had to turn around a couple of weeks later and help onboard the next generation. If done well, Readwise/Reader can become an essential social reading app for nerds, with the tool being the hub for a community of serious readers. Books are already read in circles - perhaps you should try to replace Google+ as well as Google Reader

Absolutely this. I love the app and work in research. Had I not already used Readwise to gather all my highlights the landing page would have turned me off.

In order to pay for a "reader", I actually need it to be a "writer" too. If I enjoy a post/article etc and want to comment on it, I'll have to open the actual website/app anyway. That is sufficient friction for me to instead choose directly going to multiple sources for both reading and writing.

Whoever can present me a cross-platform app that lets me add sources, bookmark stuff AND comment, has my money.

what sites do you want to be able to comment on? generally sites with eg disqus/facebook comments, or specific ones like medium, hn, reddit, ...?

Mostly HN, occasionally Reddit.

Love to attention to detail with the web app (especially the Obsidian export!). Killer feature, definitely a pocket replacement for me.

Imported an EPUB into the app. Really nice typography, so props to you on that!

The internal links seem to be not working, though. I mostly read books with a lot of footnotes, so I won't be able to try it as my daily reading driver right now, but good luck! There's not a single one good reading app out there, so the market is yours to take.

> There's not a single one good reading app out there, so the market is yours to take.

Agreed. I've been using Marvin 3 but it hasn't been updated in years. Every iOS upgrade is terrifying. The last one broken highlight actions.

Moon Reader is actually excellent if you're on Android. I rave about it here: https://ab1908.github.io/2022/02/05/moon-reader.html

Really interesting solution and I was very happy using it today! Some quick thoughts:

- It would be great if you add a feature to import an OPML

- Definitely needs a way manage feeds in folders/tags

- I would also really like a way to export my stuff in JSON/XML in case I want to move somewhere else (not sure if that exists already)

Keep up the good work! Would be happy to pay for this.

We definitely need to make this more obvious, but you can import an OPML. I usually just drag it from my downloads folder into the app, but it also works if you use the 'upload file' command.

The language is a little different than folders/tags (and believe me, I stan folders the one and only time I ever hit the front page of HN it was for an article written in defense of using folders for notetaking) but you can get basically the same effect with filtered views. Here's a deep dive our community manager Erin made if you're interested: readwise.io/reader202

I hope that helps!

PS: Dan said more export features are coming.

I'm sorry that there isn't a free/cheap tier.

I don't mind paying US$8/m when I'm actively using it, but I wouldn't want to continue that if I have a period when I'm just using it a little.

So, when/if that happens, can I easily export all my configuration data?

Heyo! Yeah there’s a free trial for 30 days and after that you can definitely export all data (links, metadata, highlights, etc)

Thank you for making this tool!

I'm interested in avoiding lock-in, and would love to be able to export every note as an individual markdown file ("export all your highlights to a single CSV file" is clunky, and unusable for me).

It looks like:

* I have to export every item individually, manually ("export highlights on a document-by-document basis to Markdown by going to your Library and clicking the down arrow as shown below")

* I have to do this every time I edit an item inside Reader.

Have you considered building a "folder sync" plugin that exports each item/note as a separate .md file, and keeps it sync'ed? Even a one-way sync would be better than the manual flow you currently have.

Thanks for sharing the post and for taking questions here!

Heyo disqard -- thanks for the feedback! You can actually already do something like this.

From readwise.io/export there is a bulk markdown option which lets you save all of your highlights/notes in a zip file, with one markdown file per document.

Automating this via a kind of folder sync is not something we do yet, but could be cool! We do have an api that makes it really easy to pull out all your highlights/notes too readwise.io/api_deets#export

Are there any plans to track reading sessions (start_at, end_at, sync position) and expose them in the API?

I currently use Marvin 3 for iOS which hasn't been updated in years but is still better than other readers. I'd love to switch to Readwise but I'll really miss the reading stats I can generate from the marvin export csvs.

This looks great and could potentially replace Feedly, Pocket and GoodNotes. And some comments mentioned that it's easy to export highlights to Obsidian. So if this turns out to live up to the promises, I see a lot of potential!

The Pocket import was a bit tricky, but probably not entirely Readwise Reader's fault. Pocket failed to log me in at first and just redirected me back to the login page. After an application data clearing it seemed to connect, but none of my articles were imported from Pocket. So I had to disconnect Pocket again, which oddly puts you on the Readwise page, and after connecting Pocket for the second time, it finally synced my articles.

Signing up on a mobile browser should lead to a splash page offering to take the customer to their app store or continue to the web app.

I use Firefox and default it to private mode, so I get a nasty little "no storage available" and a spinner that never ends.

Ah, sorry about that. Indeed, we do have that splash screen page, but for speed of development we just quickly threw it into our main webapp.

Will change that for next time, thanks!

It's a great read-it-later app, congrats on the launch.

One feature that I'm curious about is whether or not it is possible to see the most highlighted quotes for a piece of content similar to what Kindle provides(popular highlights) and what Goodreads surfaces: https://www.goodreads.com/quotes

You could even bring this to your YouTube feature with the recent "most replayed" feature they launched earlier this year: https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp/issues/3888

Just curious - is it fully “offline” / disconnected from your services? If so - why 8/month and not a single payment “unlock/pro version”? Why are more and more apps trying to tickle all our accts for monthly/recurring fees?

For this case, it's probably to cover their GPT token costs. Still though, I agree that this doesn't need to be a subscription by the look of it.

> Why are more and more apps trying to tickle all our accts for monthly/recurring fees?

Because it works. If we want to stop it, we need to actually stop paying for them.

It’s not fully offline — we sync data across your many devices, have a cloud service that parses the clean versions of documents using ML, etc

It’s just that once your device is synced, you will be able to use it + read fully offline, then have those changes sync once you’re back!

Readwise was useful and great even without Reader. Now, with Reader, it's indispensable. Everything from syncing Kindle highlights to finally solving my decades-long hunt for a good "bookmarks with annotations" solution, smooth integration with Obsidian (my "second brain" / digital hub)... it checks all my boxes. Easily in my all-time top 5 apps. The only complaint I ever had w/ Readwise was having to wait months to get the Reader beta which I finally got this summer. Bravo! Kudos! Keep it up!

I’ve been using Reader since just after the private beta launched. It’s changed the way I read and interact with articles online. Instapaper was a favorite of mine in the early iOS days but it sadly and continually became a junk drawer. Obviously Reader still has that potential but the baked-in processing workflow has helped me abate that some.

I did a video recently on YT where I walk through the app if anyone wants to take a look before you sign up.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=vRHa18fRYhU

Looks really nice and polished. One feature I think you should really try hard to add is some kind of “liquid reflow mode” for PDFs. Even if it doesn’t work for all PDFs, something that can parse the text from fully digital pdfs (ie, not scanned) and present it as regular reflowable text would be a super useful. It’s very hard to read a pdf designed for 8.5”x11” on a smartphone screen even in landscape orientation. I know it’s technically challenging but I think there’s a lot you can do there.

I’m confused, your app doesn’t appear on share options on iOS.

Please make it work with saving hackernews comment threads!

This is amazing, thank you. Been a user of Readwise for a while because it's the best highlight aggregator out there. Now that there's a reader with highlights + Obsidian.md highlight export, I can get rid of a whole stack of other apps I had glued together (https://github.com/zdwolfe/reading).

FYI, the framerate on your homepage is _really_ bad in 4K on my W11 box. I couldn't understand why it wasn't being mentioned in the comments, but then I dragged it over to my 1440p, and it was way better. Not sure what's going on, looks very pretty, but until I saw all the positive stuff here, it had totally turned me off from my trying it.

Will try it though :) Just dropping the informal ticket

Looks neat. Could you add support for storing books in a storage system I control?

I'd like to upload my books to somewhere that is under my control (google drive, dropbox, etc...). I've had bad experiences with services basically locking my library to them and making it nearly impossible to export/move them elsewhere.

It's a nice plus for you, since you don't need to pay the storage costs yourself.

I would second the idea of custom storage backends, but also warn that Google Drive and Dropbox aren't really under your control either.

Looks neat. The beta launch post is really well written and appreciate the segment on pricing.

I'd appreciate if you would consider regional pricing at some point. As it's priced today, it's more expensive than all the streaming services I use (including Netflix, Disney+). I can certainly understand why regional pricing is not for everyone and its drawbacks but just wanted to ask.

A few questions:

- Can you import from Pocket?

- Can you import from various bookmarks?

- How much do I own my data? If you go under, what's my backup plan? Open source, data exports, APIs...?

Heyo!

1. Yes, absolutely. Ex-Pocket users are some of the most common folks using Reader right now.

2. We don't really have a bookmark import yet... we strangely haven't really had enough requests (yet) to build it, but not against it!

3. You can always export all of your saved links+metadata to a CSV file, and all your highlights/notes to markdown (as well as various note-taking app integrations we have). We also have a nascent api which right now only lets you export your highlights/notes, but will be adding support for all of your links and such as well!

Reader seems like impressive, The only thing I would like to suggest is maybe adding an RTL support because that would be somehow useful.

Looks super interesting - don’t have my usual setup nearby so I’ll just ask before checking it out myself: given that you advertise super powerful highlighting, is there a feature that allows exporting/copying single/multiple highlights with proper references to what I’m reading (say, APA style)? That would be a killer feature for me.

YouTube feature is dope, congrats on launch

I may have missed it in skimming over the post, website, and github repos, but will this eventually be open source?

I would love to use such a product, but I only use open source wherever I have the option, and especially with subscription based services.

Either way, congrats on releasing a seemingly excellent product!

I've been excited for this product for a while now!

How do I set up email feeds, especially paid substack feeds?

“Loved by founders.” Who cares? I’m not a “founder” or any other kind of boss. Seems smarmy.

Sounds amazing. I might give it a try. For reference, I use pocket, netnewswire, and zotero for pdfs (zotero is a god send). But pocket is a mess, so I end up making lists in hackmd.

I think it’d be enough for this product to match zotero for me to move to it!

Also don’t see a way to search via the tags I created ?? Only the content is allowed ?? So if I create 100 tags and want to see all content on tag1 I can’t ?? I thought this is a very basic feature for such types of app

They have filter parameters you can search with, one of them being tag: https://readwise.notion.site/readwise/Reader-Filtering-Guide...

Would be easier to commit for me if there was a free option or a one-time fee. I know that's a dinosaur, but I can't justify the cost when I can put up with a little friction with Pocket + Joplin + FreshRSS.

very interesting app! i wish the authors all the best.

i have collected thousands of unread articles as bookmarks. and they all have the tags "unread" and "article". i remove the "unread" tag on articles i have read. the process of going through my list became tedious. so i wrote a chrome extension that opens a random unread article for me in a new tab.

the first thing i looked for, when i opened this app, is how to import bookmarks. and it surprised me that the authors overlooked local bookmarks or bookmark files. that's how most people save what they want to read later, no?

looking forward to seeing that feature.

thanks.

Have been using it for weeks and it’s astonishing, Readwise offers one-month trial so just give it a go, you won’t be disappointed with this feature rich app, especially the GPT-3 powered Ghostreader.

Just restarted my Readwise subscription.

* What is the amount of storage provided for users?

* How is content managed when offline? If/When I start traveling more, there will be times when I like to read without internet access.

This looks really cool! I’ve been using Raindrop for a long time.

Readwise Reader is the first thing I’ve come across that makes me seriously consider switching over. I’m definitely going to try it out.

It seems your target audience is US and Europe; the pricing clearly reflects that. In India, Pocket costs ₹500 per year (regional pricing) vs Readwise's ~₹670 per month (converted).

Replaced Newsflow recently with Readwise Reader and I'm a big fan so far. I'm only using it for RSS feeds, but I suspect I will be using it for much more than that soon.

Nice app.

There is a place for SaaS apps, no doubt, but somehow in the increasing information hostile environment and official government's positions on fighting the "disinformation, conspiracy and political incorrectness" my hunch moves me to decentralization of processes and future-proof solutions.

In my use case, this resulted in using the web browser with maximum protection available and creating a specific workflow for bookmarking and research through Obsidian. I can capture any article and directly move it to a specific folder in my vault. Then I can revisit, tag, organize and export it as PDF or HTML.

If, for some reason, Obsidian ceases to exist, the folder structure and markdown are usable in Emacs/Vim on any operating system.

Somehow, I don't trust any company which will have any form of access to my reading process. Nothing personal, just privacy.

P.S. I know, Emacs is an operating system:)

Your comment explains it, but the website itself should say what platforms it runs on. The picture shows it running on a laptop but that doesn't explain how it's done.

Interesting to see this! I've used instapaper and noticed you guys established what differs between Readwise and instapaper. Curious and looking forward to try it out!

Looks interesting, I've been considering breaking out my web clippings from my notes (Bear).

Does anyone know if it's a proper native app - or is it an electron chrome wrapper?

Interesting app. I'm a heavy user of Voice Dream Reader and Instapaper, but this app has the potential to replace both.

One question, how do I enable full text justification?

Switched over from instapaper and it's been great

Reader is awesome. I’m not a Readwise customer but the app experience is effortless. I’m going to subscribe to your service. Great job!

Seems unfinished, or maybe it has a really obscure UI. I have an ipad with a couple dozen papers I've downloaded. I signed up, installed the app, and there's nothing there. The "Library" has a single how-to article that explains how keyboard commands work in a different app and that's _it_. There's no way to add articles and no help text. I don't understand why they'd do a public launch of an app that can only read one article.

You need to add the articles you want to read. I use the Chrome extension. https://blog.readwise.io/p/bf87944f-b0fe-4f08-a461-f75ab8ade...

Pagination in epubs is by scrolling, which is not ideal. Can't figure out how to read page by page.

Search is buggy I added two things one video and one article and it can’t search either of them??

So basically, a revival of Evernote?

Giving your app a try, but it's a bit of a price hike compared to my current feed reader (Inoreader), though seems like it might be an improvement. Do you have any plans to introduce a "lite" tier without the likely costly advanced features (TTS, GPT-3 summaries, etc)? All my sources (RSS, Hackernews, Reddit, Twitter, YouTube, h-feeds, newsletters) are already RSS, some through free 3rd party tools (like killthenewsletter and granary.io) so I wouldn't miss those features either.

As an aside (and maybe this is my inner Unix proponent talking), architecturally it would be much cooler if some of these things were separated into smaller microservice-style products, e.g. a URL that you pass a YouTube URL to and it gives back an "article" with video and transcript. Then you can chain that URL with another that gives a GPT-3 TLDR on top (perhaps even passing your own API key to keep provider costs down/free). Seem like killer use cases for Cloudflare Workers. If in the end everything's RSS, users can have their choice of readers and still have cool features, though of course that would make your product less compelling.

If everyone is reading and taking notes, why do I need to take notes? Let them do it.

Everyone gets and cares about different facets of a given piece.

My last highlight is a blurb about someone charged with cutting a fence in 2013.

Why do you care about that? (You almost certainly don't!) But of course that's an important note for me! I spent two hours trying to find it!

Likewise if I gave you my notes they would make.. no sense. Well, my rough drafts might but not the bulk of it. Some of my pages of notes are literally just HN comments I find interesting.

> …folder of PDFs. Upload yours…

> Upload EPUBs…

> …compile [Twitter] threads… inside Reader

No thank you. I'm sure it's a wonderful app, but I've been burned so many times that falling for it again would be firmly into "shame on me" territory. No more trusting online services for me — I'm in data-hoarder mode now.

I use a self-hosted Wallabag and FreshRSS very heavily. Am I the intended audience?

I used that too - similar setup with shaarli and freshrss.

For a front end, I use “Reeder 5” - writing this reply in it now. ( https://www.reederapp.com/ )

Couple it with an on demand vpn like Wireguard and I can sync with the freshrss feed at home from anywhere.

And the price was “pay once” not every month.

I also have Shaarli for bookmarks.

I run Linux + Android on my devices so can't check out Reeder unfortunately. However, my setup works fine:

- RSS: FreshRSS hosted on personal server, use web interface on desktop and the truly awesome FeedMe on mobile

- Reading: Wallabag hosted on personal server, use web interface on desktop and the Wallabag app on mobile

- Bookmarks: Shaarli hosted on personal server, use web interface on desktop. I can share articles on mobile via Shaarlier but not consult them - but I don't feel the need to; I use it as a "check this website later" thing where I delete the entry after checking or storing it in my org-mode setup if I want to keep it.

Reader would replace pretty much all of that, which is nice. But it comes at the cost of 1. monthly subscription, 2. not truly owning my data/product and 3. storing all my info on an external server which I am actively trying to avoid with the above setup.

I need to revisit wallabag - though “Reeder” is working for me. Wallabag is more than just bookmark management?

Wallabag is more of an "article saving" app than a bookmarker. Via the web browser plugin it extracts the text and images from a website if it detects an "article" and stores that on your instance. You can annotate, catalogue etc. the articles at will then.

For bookmarking I use Shaarli. The two have a clearly different intended use. Probably Archivebox is combining the two, but that clones the entire HTML of a page which is also not what I was looking for.

How does it compare to Matter?

This is my question. I've hired Matter as my Read It Later app, and it works great. They do seem to be putting some of their premium features behind a paywall, which is annoying, but I'm relatively happy with the app.

Would love to see a comparison laid out.

Having the same debate - feels like this supports a better variety of sources, but Matter has a better/simpler UI for web articles & newsletters specifically.

My take (as a paying subscriber to both, largely because I want to support this world and think both teams are insanely talented and great) is that they're solving similar problems, with some different features.

I wish I could use both with a sync between them until I figure out which one I'd want to stick with. Or stick with both.

Would you ever consider a one off purchase rather than a subscription service?

Whoa this is an amazing reader experience!

I struggled to find how to change it from dark to light mode for a really long time, then found it hidden within the Aa button which is only accessible after opening a bookmark. Could you please surface that to the main screen?

Where is the gpt summary feature? I don’t see it on iOS app

When you highlight something you can click the three dots and activate “ghostreader”

Any type of calibre integration planned?

Congrats on the launch team Readwise! :)

FYI the homepage is unreadably dim as I scroll down on iPhone - some bug with the behavior that’s supposed to hide and reveal content as I scroll

How is it different from Zotero?

Pick a better name.

Loved by strangely similar looking techbros, but not, apparently, women, black people, old people, or kids.

I spotted two women in the testimonial sliders. Can't remember the last time I saw testimonials from older people or children in a tech product pitched to Hacker News in showHN/beta stage. It's hard enough launching a product - give them a chance to get established and broaden their audience.

Aren't the testimonies for all these products machine generated these days? They just need to remove the --diverse=no option from the build script.

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