Readwise is taking on Kindle and Kobo for ebook supremacy

For the last several years, Readwise has been building tools for power readers. There’s the eponymous product, Readwise, which stores and categorizes your Kindle highlights to help you remember what you’ve read. There’s Readwise Reader, an app for reading newsletters, PDFs, and web articles you’ve saved for later. And now there’s Readwise Books, a full-fledged platform for buying, reading, and talking about books.

Readwise is taking on Kindle and Kobo for ebook supremacy. Taking on Kindle is hard. Beating Goodreads might be really easy.

Readwise Books is currently in beta, available through invite or to existing Readwise subscribers. I’ve been testing the app for a few days, and it’s a much bigger take on reading than most. Tristan Homsi and Daniel Doyon, Readwise’s cofounders, like to call the platform “Strava for reading” because it can track how long, how much, and how fast you read, and it can show that information to friends you make in the Readwise Books app. The app’s homepage is a feed of what other people are reading, with comments and recommendations laced throughout.

“Strava for reading” wasn’t the original goal of Readwise Books, which has been part of the Readwise plan since the beginning. “Literally, Dan and I talked about this when we first met,” Homsi says. “We feel like Kindle could be so much better. We really didn’t think it would take nine-plus years to be able to get to this point.” But it turns out, Doyon adds, that for all their ideas about innovation in books, “no one sits around wanting a better Kindle.” But there is one thing they do wish for: a better Goodreads. “Everybody hates Goodreads.”

In a sense, then, the plan for Readwise Books is to take on Kindle by first taking on Goodreads. The Readwise Books app offers a nice way to track books you want to read, are reading, and have read; it even syncs with your Kindle account to let you track books you’ve bought from Amazon by taking pictures of your starting and ending pages. You can rate and review books and see what others have said. It’s a little Strava, a little Letterboxd, and a lot nicer to look at than Goodreads.