Readwise is taking on Kindle and Kobo for ebook supremacy

For the last several years, Readwise has been building tools for power readers. There’s the eponymous product, Readwise, which stores and categorizes your Kindle highlights to help you remember what you’ve read. There’s Readwise Reader, an app for reading newsletters, PDFs, and web articles you’ve saved for later. And now there’s Readwise Books, a full-fledged platform for buying, reading, and talking about books.

Readwise Books is currently in beta, available through invite or to existing Readwise subscribers. I’ve been testing the app for a few days, and it’s a much bigger take on reading than most. Tristan Homsi and Daniel Doyon, Readwise’s cofounders, like to call the platform “Strava for reading” because it can track how long, how much, and how fast you read, and it can show that information to friends you make in the Readwise Books app. The app’s homepage is a feed of what other people are reading, with comments and recommendations laced throughout.

“Strava for reading” wasn’t the original goal of Readwise Books, which has been part of the Readwise plan since the beginning. “Literally, Dan and I talked about this when we first met,” Homsi says. “We feel like Kindle could be so much better. We really didn’t think it would take nine-plus years to be able to get to this point.” But it turns out, Doyon adds, that for all their ideas about innovation in books, “no one sits around wanting a better Kindle.” But there is one thing they do wish for: a better Goodreads. “Everybody hates Goodreads.”

In a sense, then, the plan for Readwise Books is to take on Kindle by first taking on Goodreads. The Readwise Books app offers a nice way to track books you want to read, are reading, and have read; it even syncs with your Kindle account to let you track books you’ve bought from Amazon by taking pictures of your starting and ending pages. You can rate and review books and see what others have said. It’s a little Strava, a little Letterboxd, and a lot nicer to look at than Goodreads.

The long-term goal, of course, is to get people to stop buying Kindle books and start buying from Readwise. Homsi and Doyon have spent the last several years working to reach deals with all five of the major US publishers in order to have a competitive library of books available. That meant endless negotiations, security reviews, DRM debates, and more — both cofounders seem exhausted just talking about the process. But eventually, by several small miracles, they got the deals done. And since those deals govern the price of books, and many things about how they’re sold and presented, they bring Readwise to a nearly even playing field almost immediately.

It all took a lot longer than expected, but Doyon and Homsi think their timing might actually be pretty good. Digital book reading continues to grow, particularly among young people; a huge amount of that reading happens on phones and tablets. Meanwhile, a new crop of E Ink devices like the tiny Xteink and the Boox Palma line have expanded the universe of available hardware for a company like Readwise.

Not long ago, Doyon says, they would have had no choice but to build an e-reader of their own. (And he says they still might.) Now, they can just make sure it runs on an E Ink-friendly flavor of Android.

After a couple of days using Readwise Books, I can say confidently I already like it better than practically all of its competition. It’s a much nicer-looking app than anything you’ll get from Kindle or Kobo; it has lots of ways to customize how books look; and at least for now, I’m finding the tracking features compel me to read more instead of annoying me. (Homsi says some early versions of the gamification features were substantially more annoying.) I’ve found a few bugs, and the half-integration with Kindle is a little confusing in spots, but it’s already a really nice place to read.

Of course, I, like millions of other people, already own a Kindle and lots of Kindle books. Switching ebook platforms is hard, and Doyon says he’s not counting on everyone to do it right away. He says he’s hopeful Readwise can persuade existing users to switch, in order to sync their notes and progress more seamlessly. He’s also hoping that the advent of AI, and the ways in which AI reliance may rot our brains, will get a lot of people back into the idea of reading more deeply again. And that a bunch of those people might be looking for a nicer, more social place to do so.