A New Ebook Store Wants to Track How You Read, Not Just What You Buy
Readwise has launched Readwise Books, an ebook store and reading app. The company describes it as a mix of the Kindle and Goodreads apps. TechCrunch reported the launch on November 2, 2026. The goal is one place to buy, read and keep track of your books.
Readwise first announced the product on October 28, 2026, in a blog post called "Readwise Books: Step Three of Our Master Plan." The company calls it an indie ebook store and app. Readwise was founded by Daniel Doyon and Tristan Homsi. Its existing products include an app for saving articles to read later, and a reading companion that tracks highlights across different services. Readwise Books is the third step in that plan.
The store opened with millions of ebooks from the Big Five publishers, the five largest in the industry, and from other publishers. It is available in the U.S. first, and more countries will follow. Print books are shipped through the distributor that serves Bookshop.org. The store also sells some audiobooks.
Readers can upload their own ebook files in the EPUB format, as long as the files are DRM-free. DRM, short for digital rights management, is a lock that limits how a book can be copied or shared. The app can also read ebooks aloud with text-to-speech.
The app can record reading you do in Kindle's web reader, Cloud Reader. You can also take a photo of a paper book to log your progress. Your reading history can be imported from Kindle and Goodreads.
The most detailed part is the statistics. Readwise Books tracks words read, pace, depth, immersion and sessions. The company compares this to Strava, the app where runners and cyclists log workouts and compete with friends. Strava made exercise data into a social habit. Readwise is making the same kind of comparison for reading.
Readwise's reading app, Reader, already turns articles, PDFs and ebooks into audio. It uses natural-sounding AI voices, lets you change the speed, and works in dozens of languages, according to Readwise's product page.
In my view, the store itself is the less distinctive part. Ebook shopping is a crowded market. Whether Readwise Books succeeds will depend on prices, how many books are available in each country, and whether publishers and readers are willing to use a store that is not Amazon.
The tracking is the more interesting bet. Knowing your pace and depth is not the same as knowing what you bought or how you rated a book. It shows how you read. That is a different kind of information, and a more personal one.
The broader context here is how the app handles files. Uploading DRM-free EPUB files lets readers bring in books they already own in an open format. That sets it apart from apps built around one company's store. Whether most readers care about this is not yet clear. For people who switch between devices, apps and formats, one record of purchases, uploads, audio and paper books could be useful. That holds as long as the data can be moved elsewhere and the user can see and control what gets recorded.
Readwise says the U.S. store is only the start. The near-term test is less about the feature list. It is whether the catalog, the reading tools and the tracking work well enough together that a reader never has to leave the app.
