đź”— Readwise Reader got a big e-book update
One of my favorite apps might just have killed one other of my favorite apps.
You can now read ebooks with a dedicated "long-form" user interface, 10x+ faster speed & performance, chapter breaks, and dozens of formatting fixes.
Readwise Reader easily ranks in my top 5 apps of all time. Between prepping overkill digest, saving posts from my RSS feed or stuff people send me, and storing work PDFs, I spend multiple hours in Reader every week.
But I'd say I still clock more hours reading books in KOReader. Well, until now. Because after testing the new ebook features in Readwise, I'm seriously considering switching all my reading to just one app.
They completely overhauled how EPUBs work. Before, Reader treated them like one giant article, which meant slow performance, no real ebook structure, and a UI optimized for blog posts, not books.
Now, it loads one chapter at a time (way faster!), adds proper page breaks between chapters, and introduces a clean, minimal long-form reading view that’s perfect for getting lost in a book.
With this update, they also improved how Reader behaves on e-ink devices, and you know I love my e-ink devices (1, 2, 3, 4, 5). Using Reader on an e-ink device automatically enables the new e-ink mode, which in turn applies a high contrast color palette and reduces animations.
And as for some other noteworthy changes:
- PDF uploads now come with a much better, clean view, so you can read, highlight, and even listen to them like regular text.
- You can now chat with documents directly in the web reader using LLMs.
- Documents of all types now open way faster, not just EPUBs.
- You can listen to your daily reviews with high-quality voices, making them feel more like a custom podcast of your best highlights.
- Themed reviews are now way easier to create, letting you resurface highlights on any topic without the manual setup.
- You can now export to Craft.
So, what was already one of my favorite apps just levelled up.