Readwise

Productivity

highlight review and retention

SHOW HN2017

90points
32comments
#501of 2,242 in 2017
Top 23%of 2017 by points

How HN took it

MixedNo clear lean

8 positive, 3 neutral or asking, 3 mixed, 3 critical, out of 17 comments about the project. Thread score +0.18.

Idea: 5 for, 0 againstExecution: 2 for, 1 againstPrivacy: 0 for, 2 againstPricing: 1 for, 0 against

The thread, comment by comment

Each row is a top-level comment and its replies, in HN's order. Select a cell to open that comment on HN.

positive neutral or mixed critical about another commenter or something else the maker

What HN said

What people liked

  • Useful for retaining book ideas

    From 3 comments
    • Hey HN, As self-proclaimed bibliomaniacs, we were pained by how hard it was to revisit and organize our highlights. It would often feel like we'd read a book, have phenomenal new…
      tristanho on HN
    • I dig it! Like reliving all the good moments from a great book. I think it would change the way I highlight stuff, from references to more memories. Providing a good memorable…
      overcast on HN
    • Thanks for doing this - this seems like a very good addition to improve the retention of the information intake for books. At least for me - I've noticed that resurfacing what…
      stpe on HN
  • Better than painful manual Evernote copying

    From 2 comments
    • I currently manually copy highlights and notes to Evernote (one note per book). It's way painful. I'd be willing to pay a reasonable fee for that functionality. Will sign up when…
      murrayb on HN
    • This looks pretty cool. I’d rather use this than maintain my mess of selenium scripts I was using for this purpose.
      ryanmarsh on HN

Objections

  • Terms of service grant overly broad rights to user content

    From 1 comment
    • Good question! We modelled our TOS off others around the web, and I believe that term was somewhat standard. I agree it's quite aggressive though -- we're going to look into…
      tristanho on HN
  • Chrome extension and Amazon login raise privacy concerns

    From 1 comment
    • Hey jszym, that's our bad. We do mention the extension being required on our landing page (below the fold), but we definitely could make it more clear. Thanks for raising it to…
      tristanho on HN
  • Does not support non-Amazon highlights

    From 2 comments
    • That is indeed correct. We currently only support importing your highlights synced with Amazon's cloud. It's totally possible to also allow you sync with the notes from books on…
      tristanho on HN
    • This is cool, but most of the books on my Kindle don't come from Amazon so the highlights aren't synced online. I would like a version of this that just works on the kindle's…
      spookyuser on HN

Requests

  • Support Calibre, Kobo, Moon Reader and KO Reader imports

    From 2 comments
    • Thanks ropeladder :) Calibre, Kobo and Moon Reader are all on the list!
      tristanho on HN
    • Added KO to our list too (damn, this is list is getting long...)
      tristanho on HN
  • Support My Clippings.txt import

    From 1 comment
    • We're on it spookyuser! Probably the next import method we look at.
      tristanho on HN
  • Manual highlight entry

    From 1 comment
    • Hey, thank you for the product, I will be using it regularly. One feature request though: I'd like to use Readwise as my "central dump of highlights," but not every highlight I…
      digorithm on HN
  • Firefox extension

    From 1 comment
    • Have you considered packaging the Chrome extension as a WebExtension for Firefox? https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Add-ons/WebExtensions/Porting_a_Google_Chrome_extension
      mintplant on HN

Questions

  • What is the business model?

    From 1 comment
    • This looks pretty cool! What's the business model going to be? The ToU are quite far-reaching regarding user content: "By submitting User Content through the Services, you hereby…
      thomas11 on HN
  • Are there other ways to browse highlights?

    From 1 comment
    • This looks pretty cool! What's the business model going to be? The ToU are quite far-reaching regarding user content: "By submitting User Content through the Services, you hereby…
      thomas11 on HN

Alternatives named

  • Clippings.io

    From 1 comment
    • I've been using https://www.clippings.io/ for years and have been very happy with their excellent Chrome Extension…
      kindlelover on HN
  • Anki

    From 1 comment
    • Think you might be interested in checking out https://apps.ankiweb.net/ for expansion ideas!
      farsight on HN
  • Kintrospect

    From 1 comment
    • Super interesting, I did a small tool for myself for this same purpose. Is a mix between highlights and Evernote https://kintrospect.com/
      abuiles on HN

Category, keywords, summaries and labels on this page were made by AI (Thread Reader v2) and not checked by hand. Each point links to the comments it came from.

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