Readwise Launches Readwise Books, a Store With a Reading Log Attached
Readwise has launched Readwise Books, a platform for buying, reading and discussing books. The service is in beta and available by invitation or to existing Readwise subscribers, according to The Verge.
Readwise was co-founded by Tristan Homsi and Daniel Doyon. Its existing products are Readwise, which stores highlights from Kindle books, and Readwise Reader, which handles newsletters, PDFs and saved web articles. Readwise Books adds a storefront and a social layer to that lineup. The company describes it as a service where users can buy, read, and track all their books in one place.
The store is referred to in Readwise's terms of service as the Readwise Bookshop, defined as the company's store for ebooks, audiobooks and print books. Readwise has reached deals with all five major US publishers to offer a library of titles through the service.
The reading-tracking side is where the product departs most visibly from a conventional ebook retailer. The cofounders describe Readwise Books as "Strava for reading", a reference to the fitness app that logs runs and rides and shares them with a feed of friends. Readwise Books tracks how long, how much and how fast users read, and lets them share that data in the app. The homepage shows what other people are reading, with comments and recommendations attached.
For Kindle users, the app syncs with a Kindle account to track books bought from Amazon. It does this by taking pictures of the starting and ending pages of a reading session, which lets Readwise log progress on titles it did not sell. Readwise Reader, for its part, lets users upload EPUB files, a widely used open ebook format, and read them alongside newsletters and articles.
The company's stated long-term goal is to get people to stop buying Kindle books and start buying from Readwise. That is an aspiration, not a current position. The beta and invitation structure suggests the catalog, pricing and sync features are still being tested with a limited audience.
In my view, the Kindle integration is the detail worth watching closely. A service that reads progress from a rival's account depends on that account continuing to permit it, and the reading data it collects is personal in a way that a playlist or a fitness log is not. Readers evaluating the product will want to see how the company handles that data, and how the sync holds up as the beta widens.
The broader context here is a long-running tension in digital reading. The highlights, progress and notes a reader generates have largely lived inside whichever store sold the book. Readwise is betting that a reader's history matters more to the reader than to the retailer, and that a shared, social view of reading will draw people in. If the catalog and tracking hold together, a reader who already keeps highlights in Readwise gets one place to buy, read and compare notes. For anyone who reads heavily for work, that is a practical gain.
