Sources: Eva Keiffenheim & Ravi Kurani & Nicole van der Hoeven & Kyle Stratis You can see this in the many tutorials all over the internet teaching you how to cobble together half a dozen reading apps resulting in diagrams like below: Is a sequential series of longform email newsletters really that different from an ebook? Is a thread of tweets really that different from a blog post? As everything blends together, what's the purpose of all these different containers? Meanwhile, the lines separating media types have blurred. What we mean by this is that digital reading is terribly fragmented. There are many problems with digital reading we hope to solve with Reader (see: our quasi-manifesto), but the first we've chosen to focus on is what we call 'unbundling'. We conclude with a brief discussion of our bootstrapped business model and what we look forward to building next year. The rest of this post gets into the Reader product including its first value proposition of 'all your reading in one place' as well as our favorite innovations to date. → If you haven't already, join the beta of Reader for free here: readwise.io/read. It's also an opportunity for you to help shape the future of digital reading 🙂 We're just hoping the 'public beta' label buys us a little leeway for the next few months while we continue to smooth out rough edges. That said, we're ready to release Reader into the wild because thousands of beta testers have battle-tested the product and, even though you might run into something here or there, the core experience is solid. Meanwhile, we had to make sure the app works well on Chrome, Firefox, and Safari as well as iOS and Android. We basically had to build five different kinds of reading apps at the same time without accidentally developing the software equivalent of a spork. We're still calling this release a 'public beta' because the surface area of the Reader product is rather vast.

We hope you love Reader, even in its public beta state, as much as our testers have! The good news is that we're through the woods and the cumulative effect of bringing all these different content types together under one roof is as magical as we thought it would be. For example, unifying the user experience of an RSS feed reader – which automatically pushes low signal-to-noise content to you all day – with a read-it-later app proved to be quite the product challenge. Watch it evolve - Reader is being actively developed with responsive customer support and rapid feedback loops informed by beta testers who are already reading in the app for hours a day.Īdmittedly, getting from a next-generation read-it-later app (where we were last year) to an all-in-one reading app (where we are now) turned out to be harder than we thought.

Read anywhere - Reader is built with a local-first, cross-platform architecture enabling full-text search and offline reading with data constantly synced across web and mobile devices. All-in-one does not mean one-size-fits-all so Reader can adapt to your unique needs. Highlight like a pro - Reader is intended for power users with productivity-oriented innovations such as first-class highlighting & annotating, keyboard-based reading, text-to-speech, GPT-3 (aka Ghostreader), and much more.Ĭustomize your experience - Reader is designed with the flexibility to accommodate a variety of consumer, professional, and academic use cases. You can even highlight the open web using the Reader browser extensions and highlight Youtube videos in the Reader interface.

Read anything - Reader handles not only web articles saved for later, but also email newsletters, RSS feeds, Twitter threads, Twitter lists, PDFs, and EPUBs. If you've used Instapaper or Pocket, it's like those except built for 2023 and beyond. What is Reader? In case you missed our original manifesto, Reader is a more powerful, more flexible version of the classic read-it-later app. Get started for free at readwise.io/read. Today, we're excited to announce the public beta of our own, fully-integrated reading app (known as 'Reader').

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