Readwise, the maker of a read-it-later app and digital reading companion that keeps track of your highlights across services, is now taking on Amazon’s e-book empire with its latest app, Readwise Books. The app is an e-book store also helps you track what you’ve read, similar to Amazon’s Goodreads.
The bootstrapped startup described the new app as “a cross between Kindle and the Goodreads apps,” as it offers a single place to buy, read, and track books. However, Readwise Books aims to offer more detailed reading stats, than the dates you read a book and whether you finished it. It lets readers visualize richer reading data like words read, pace, depth, immersion, and sessions.
Meanwhile, its new store offers “millions” of ebooks from the big five publishers and others, initially in the U.S., with more countries to come. Print books (fulfilled by Bookshop.org’s distributor) and some audiobooks are available as well, the company notes.
The launch comes at a time when there’s been an explosion of new reading apps and book trackers, all hoping to challenge Goodreads by introducing new features like book clubs, widgets, improved discovery features, goal-setting, better lists and organizational tools, habit-tracking, and more. However, few indie developers have gone so far as to launch an alternative to Amazon’s Kindle e-books store, which remains the industry leader, with an 83% share of the market when Kindle+ (formerly Kindle Unlimited) is included in the stats.
One of Kindle’s bigger advantages is that it offers an end-to-end solution for everything related to reading e-books, from the hardware devices to the book-tracking log. Readwise isn’t selling its own e-readers, but it is attempting to create its own community around reading, complete with tools for reading purchased and uploaded ebooks, tracking them (like on Goodreads), sharing your reading progress with friends, and more.
It also offers a number of ways to track books outside its ecosystem. This includes a way to track reading sessions by using Kindle’s browser-based Cloud Reader and a feature that lets you snap photos of physical books to mark your progress. Plus, you can upload any DRM-free EPUBs (a common ebook file format without copy protection). The app can read your ebooks aloud via text-to-speech.
Readwise believes its more in-depth metrics could be a big selling point, too, likening them to a “Strava for reading” — a reference to the metrics-heavy running app.
“The desire to read books, like exercising and eating well, is laden with guilt,” the company explained in a blog post penned by co-founders Daniel Doyon and Tristan Homsi. “Many people feel like they should be reading more, but feeling bad about it tends to change nothing. The session tracking taps into a different psychological mechanism. It makes the reading you’re doing legible and, as the adage goes, that which is measured is improved.”
The company adds that the most consistent feedback from users is that the app has led them to read more without willpower tricks like goal-setting, streaks, or scheduling.
With publishers’ permission, the app will support AI-powered features as well, like session recaps, definitions and term lookups, word and phrase translations, and a location-aware ability to ask questions about the part you’re reading. (So far, only Harper Collins has opted in, though.)
Unlike Goodreads’ locked-down ecosystem, Readwise is embracing open technology. This includes a public API and an MCP server. The latter supports AI agents that could be used to research book recommendations on your behalf, use your Readwise data to create a books page on your personal website, or even wire up your hackable e-reader to log your sessions automatically, depending on how involved your AI use cases may be.
The new Readwise Books app will remain free, with some AI features later going behind a paywall. Its prior apps for reading and tracking highlights are either $7.99 per month each, or $9.99 per month for both.
The Books app is currently in beta and requires an invite, unless you’re already a Readwise subscriber.
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