Category: Review

A couple of years ago I needed to get an audiobook fast but had already done a free trial of Audible. That’s when I discovered Audiobooks.com and tried them out for the first time. I couldn’t be happier with them and that I’d finally found an awesome (and possibly even better) alternative to Audible! If you’re wondering if Audiobooks.com is legit and worth it, or have any other questions about it, our review of Audiobooks.com is here to help!

You can jump to any section with this handy table of contents:

And if you need to get back here at any time, just click on the up arrow in the bottom right corner of the page.

Let’s get right to the point though with my quick summary, which gives brief answers to the main questions you have about Audiobooks.com!

Quick Summary of my Audiobooks.com Review (FAQ) 

• Is Audiobooks.com legit? Audiobooks.com is a legitimate company with over 1,000,000 downloads of its app. It’s one of the best places to get audiobooks that I’ve ever used.
• Is Audiobooks.com the same as Audible? Audiobooks.com is not the same as Audible, they are two separate companies and services with different pros and cons for each.
• How big is the selection at Audiobooks.com? Audiobooks.com has over 250,000 books, including all of your favorite bestsellers. I used my free trial to get Atomic Habits, for instance!
• Does Audiobooks.com have a free trial? What comes with it? Audiobooks.com has an awesome free trial which gives you not one but THREE free audiobooks! The first you get to pick from their entire library and you also get to select two from their VIP selection, which includes a lot of bestsellers and some really great books you might not have heard about.
• What do I get with an Audiobooks.com Subscription? How does TWO audiobooks a month sound? With an Audiobooks.com subscription, you get one free audiobook credit per month that you can use to get any audiobook from their library of 250,000+ in addition to one credit for any book in the VIP library, which changes each month. Their library also includes dozens of useful audio experiences like sleep tracks, podcasts, news, and more.
• Do you keep books after canceling your Audiobooks.com subscription? If you do decide to cancel your Audiobooks.com subscription, you will keep all audiobooks you acquired while subscribed. I’ve used the app both as a paying subscriber and not and I can still listen to all the books I acquired when subscribed.
• How much does Audiobooks.com cost? Audiobooks.com costs $14.95 per month after the 30-day free trial period, not including tax. You can also buy audiobooks individually for the usual price.
• Is Audiobooks.com worth the money? Getting two audiobooks a month for the same price as most other audiobook services plus access to podcasts and free audiobooks is totally worth it!

Pros and Cons of Audiobooks.com

There’s not a whole lot to say of a service that’s as straightforward as bringing you the world’s best audiobooks. But Audiobooks.com does have a few specific pros and cons that I’ll go over now.

Pros of using Audiobooks.com:

1. You get 2 audiobooks a month as opposed to just the 1 you get from Audible. One of those you can select from their 250,000+ book library and the other comes from the VIP selection, which changes monthly.
2. The selection of books is fantastic, I’ve never had trouble finding all of the most popular books that I love. The Audiobooks.com library is just as big as any other audiobooks service, if not bigger!
3. Audiobooks.com is just as easy to use as other services like it, if not more so. I personally like the user interface of Audiobooks.com and it’s app better than others like it. It’s easier to get around and to find what you’re looking for. I especially like that the menu is more easily accessible and that it’s got everything I need all in one place.
4. The VIP selection often includes really popular titles that I wouldn’t think to get otherwise. I really enjoy the idea of a VIP selection as it is, and I was really glad to see that it includes high-quality books and not some random books with low ratings. 
5. Audiobooks.com is all about audiobooks and nothing else, so you’re getting a top-quality service from a company that really knows what they’re doing. I say this because this is a big plus when comparing it to Audible, which is part of Amazon. It’s like buying running shoes from a dedicated company that just does running shoes, as opposed to a company that makes all types of shoes.

Cons of using Audiobooks.com:

1. Occasionally there are issues with listening offline. Sometimes I have trouble getting to the right spot where I was listening if I go back online again after being offline for a while. It’s not too big of a deal though and I can usually fix it within seconds.
2. It’s easy to get distracted and miss the details when listening. I couldn’t begin to count the many times I’ve gotten distracted and had to rewind a book. But you’re going to have this with any audiobooks service, really.
3. The VIP selection isn’t always the best and won’t always have books you’ll want to read. Time is a scarce resource for everybody, and it’s not fun to waste it on a book that isn’t good. That being said, occasionally you do find hidden gems in there that you would have never found otherwise.

What is it Like to Use the Audiobooks.com App? 

The Audiobooks.com app is available for free on both iPhone and Android. You can also listen to books online, but most of the features and the user interface are nearly identical, so I’ll only be focusing on the app here.

I love how simple the app is. When you log in and look at your books, you have three main selections you can choose from:

1. Current Listens, which includes the books you’ve started listening to.
2. My Library, including all the books you’ve acquired through your Audiobooks.com subscription or free trial.
3. Wishlists, where you can see books that you’ve added to your wishlist while shopping. This makes it super easy to use your credits each month.

Here’s what it looks like when you’re on the My Library and Current Listens tabs:

And here’s a screenshot of what the Wishlist looks like:

Then there’s the menu in the upper right corner that gives you access to all features, including:

• Search
• Featured
• Browse
• Audiobooks Clubs
• My Books
• My Notes
• Member Deals
• My Recommendations
• VIP Rewards
• Free Audiobooks
• Podcasts
• Sleep & Meditation
• Summaries & More
• Audio Magazines
• Audio News
• My Profile
• Settings
• Customer Service

Here’s what this looks like when you’re in the app:

There’s not much else to say about it, the app is easy to use, user-friendly, and I love listening to audiobooks with it. Let’s take a look at some of these features in more detail to see more reasons why it’s such a great app.

What Are the Main Features of the Audiobooks.com App?

You’d think that it’s just as simple as listening to books, but the Audiobooks.com app has a lot of useful tools. We’ll start here with the main ones, then in the next section talk about some of the other benefits not related to audiobooks specifically.

As I’ve mentioned, the main one is, of course, listening to audiobooks, which is seamless. You can play the books you’ve acquired with your credits, as well as download them for offline use. 

One unique feature that I really love is that the player lets you show your time in the book either by chapter or by the book as a whole. It’s also broken up into tracks and gives the ability to fast-forward or rewind up to 60 seconds and down to 10 seconds.

My favorite listening feature, that blows Audible out of the water for me, is that it will still let me cast to any device in the house. Because I have an iPhone and use Google Nest speakers around my house, my ability to cast from my phone to the speakers is often pretty limited. Audible is one of those that, unfortunately, won’t let me cast an audiobook to the Google Nest speaker. Audiobooks.com, on the other hand, does let me cast my books to my speakers still, which is a game-changer!

Another cool feature of the Audiobooks.com app is that you can add bookmarks to your favorite parts of the book and write notes on them! I haven’t used this to its full potential yet, honestly. But this is a game-changer for those who have ever tried to find that one spot in an audiobook and know that it can take forever going back and forth! 

The next feature is shopping for audiobooks, which you can do in a lot of ways:

• Searching, which is the easiest way to shop and is pretty straightforward. I love that it doesn’t just show the book I searched for, but includes other books by that same author.
• The featured section, which includes sections such as Recommended for You, This Week’s Top Releases, Best Selling Audiobooks of All Time, Audiobooks for a Fresh Start, and a ton more.
• Browsing, which takes you to a list of genres that you can choose from. I really love that it includes the main genres, but gets way more helpful than the usual random ones by adding unique and interesting genres like free, recommended, immersive & radically different, and more.
• Member deals that show you the 2 for 1 deals in different categories. This is a really cool feature and I love how easy it makes it to find deals!
• The My Recommendations section, which lets you choose the categories of books you like then gives you suggested titles based on what you’ve selected.
• VIP Rewards, which is the selection of books that you get to choose your one VIP title from each month. Don’t forget that you also get one credit to use on any of their 250,000+ library, though!

One of my favorite aspects of searching for new books on Audiobooks.com is the samples they give. For comparison, when you listen to a sample on Audible, it’s usually from the middle of the book. And it’s only about five minutes long. Audiobooks.com, on the other hand, gives you 10 minutes of free listening instead of just 5. And it starts at the beginning of the book so you can get a better sense of what it’s about before deciding if you want to get it.

Another excellent feature is free audiobooks. The selection here isn’t the best, but that’s to be expected with anything free. While looking through this I have found popular titles like The Art of War and Machiavelli’s The Prince, however, so there are some nuggets in there!

Another neat way you can use your monthly credit if you have a subscription is by signing up for what they call Audiobook Clubs. This isn’t a traditional book club where you read books and discuss them with others. Instead, you can use one credit to get access to one of eight “Audiobook Clubs.” If you select this option, you can listen to the thousands of titles in that club, as much as you want, for the entire month. And of course, you can browse the titles before you decide so you can see if you want to use this option!

These are just the main features of Audiobooks.com as they relate to listening to audiobooks. But these aren’t the only listening benefits you get with a subscription. We’ll take a look at those next!

Other Benefits Than Just Audiobooks

All of the other benefits to having an Audiobooks.com subscription or just using the app without a subscription relate to consuming information in audio format. 

The first of these is podcasts, which you can find, subscribe to, and listen to just like in any other podcast app. This is really helpful especially if you like to have your podcasts and audiobooks all in one place.

Another of Audiobooks.com’s awesome audio experience features is the sleep section. In this area, you can find meditations, visualizations, soothing sounds, bedtime stories, relaxing tracks, and ASMR audio to help you sleep. This is a pretty unique feature that is really helpful. Plus, the selection is amazing, I think every type of person can find something to help them sleep in it!

After that comes the section called Summaries & More. This includes a few different podcasts, including audio versions of book summaries, book clubs, discussions, conversations and interviews, and more. You’re going to love this section if you enjoy hearing people talk about books of all kinds. And it will likely help you decide on how to use your credits, too!

Next is Audio Magazines, which is where you can find audio content from popular publications like National Geographic, The Guardian, The New York Times, and more.

And finally, there’s Audio News. In this area, you can find out what’s happening in the world in audio format. It includes many popular news outlets like Entertainment Weekly, Vox, NPR, and more.

I’ll just mention briefly that Audiobooks.com of course has all the typical features to manage your account, change settings, and get support. I like that they have a chat feature built into the app, which makes getting support easy!

Is Audiobooks.com Worth It?

To determine if it’s worth it, let’s look at the cost and what you get for it. Then I’ve got a fun thought experiment to help us see what the value is of all the features! 

An Audiobooks.com subscription costs $14.95 per month. For that, you get one credit to use on any of their 250,000+ audiobooks. You also get an additional credit to use on their VIP selection, which includes popular titles and some hidden gems. Plus, you can download any audiobook for offline listening wherever you go.

You also get access to free audiobooks, podcasts, and other additional audio experiences like meditation, sleep, summaries, book clubs, audio magazines, and audio news. And if you want, you can use your credit to get access to Audiobook Clubs, which includes thousands of titles in one specific category of your choice.

These are just the features, but what do they bring into your life that makes them worth paying for? Let’s break it down into two components:

1. Entertainment, such as getting engrossed in a story you’ve never heard before. Listening to an exciting fictional book takes you to new worlds and lets you relax from the craziness of life. You forget about all that’s going on around you and can really just check out for a while.
2. Information, like learning how to start a business, improve your finances, be more productive, acquire a skill, or start a new hobby, just to name a few. Simply put, this is the power to transform your life for the better in any way you want.

I’m personally listening to a few different audiobooks right now and it’s a mix of fiction and non-fiction and I clearly see these benefits myself. 

For the fiction books I listen to, I love how they help me decompress. I often get caught up in thinking about work too much, especially when I should be taking a break. It’s almost impossible to get my mind to stop being in work mode, even hours after I’ve stopped working. But the fastest way of fixing this problem, I’ve found, is to plug in my headphones and turn on a fiction audiobook. 

I’m instantly thrown into a story with characters who have much different problems than my own. But I love hearing the story as they work hard and overcome challenges, which inspires me. By turning my mind to something outside of my own world, I get a mental break from work that’s really difficult to get otherwise. And a lot of the time I find that I’ll learn little things here and there that help me with work, too! 

When it comes to non-fiction books, I love how they help me improve my life. I’ve been learning recently about the power of thinking. How we think determines how we live, so if we can harness positive thinking, we can create the life we dream of. With non-fiction books, you can intentionally guide your thinking patterns to make you healthy, happy, and successful. This is where we get into that thought experiment I mentioned earlier.

Another thing I love about non-fiction books has to do with this quote from Jim Rohn:

“You are the average of the 5 people you spend the most time with.”

The main idea is that the people around you, or who you choose to listen to, rather, determine whether your life is good or bad. And with books, you can choose to listen to whoever you want, even people who you couldn’t otherwise learn from. I like to think of the quote like this instead:

“You are the average of the 5 authors you read the most.”

In other words, reading a nonfiction book is like getting into that author’s head and seeing how they think. Not only that but learning from and being influenced by their higher ways of thinking. And the more you do that, the better you’ll think. Which, as I mentioned earlier, is the pathway to getting whatever you want out of life. 

You also get the benefits of reading in general, which can include:

• Better sleep
• Lower stress
• Improved health
• Better brain connectivity
• Less mental illness
• Keeping your mental faculties as you age
• Greater empathy

Now, you may be thinking “this all sounds great but why Audiobooks.com? Why should I get a subscription to it instead of some other audiobooks service?” 

The main difference why I personally choose Audiobooks.com over other services is because of the number of books you get with it. 

Think about it. All those benefits I’ve mentioned. The ability to disconnect from work and relax, the power to improve your thinking, and all the other life-improvements that come from reading. The more you read, the more you reap the benefits. And with Audiobooks.com, you can read more than any other audiobooks service.

If you want to get all the perks of listening to audiobooks, but double them by getting more audiobooks, Audiobooks.com is well worth the price and it’s better than its competitors for this reason alone.

Conclusion: My Audiobooks.com Review

When I first discovered Audiobooks.com a couple of years ago, I was pleasantly surprised at the selection, the multiple free audiobooks that came with a free trial, and that a subscription got me two audiobooks a month instead of just one. It’s been awesome ever since, and I’d recommend it to anybody. 

As far as audiobook services go, Audiobooks.com is pretty straightforward. It’s got an app for listening, shopping, and accessing all the other amazing benefits that come with being a member. At $14.95 a month, the price is pretty comparable to other options as well.

But what really sets Audiobooks.com apart is that they are experts in their field. There’s no “parent company” behind it, it’s just audiobooks and Audiobooks.com is great at providing them. 

Audiobooks.com is also a better choice over other audiobooks services because of how generous they are. With two credits a month and a ton of other great audio content, you get a lot more to choose from, and it’s a lot less likely that you’ll run out of books before each month is over!

My final conclusion about Audiobooks.com is that it’s definitely worth the price to get two audiobooks a month, a great listening experience, and hundreds of other useful and entertaining audio experiences. 

If you’d like to try it out yourself and support Four Minute Books at no extra cost to you, click below to sign up for your free 30-day trial of Audiobooks.com and get 3 free audiobooks, no questions asked:

And if you’ve made it all the way here, thank you for reading this review! I hope that Four Minute Books helps you learn more, get smarter, and improve your life!

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Other Reviews

Looking for our other reviews of the most popular book summary apps, tools, and services? Here’s a list of all the reviews we’ve published so far:

Welcome to our Instaread review!

How good is Instaread as a book summary app? Is it a good Blinkist Alternative? Does it have better book summaries? What are its advantages and disadvantages? Is the user experience good enough?

In this review, we’ll be looking at a great book summary app called Instaread. By the end of this post, you’ll understand how Instaread works and where it stands as an alternative to Blinkist.

To easily navigate our extensive review of Instaread, use the table of contents below to jump to any section:

You can also come back up here at any time by hitting the little arrow icon in the bottom right corner of this page.

Alright, let’s get into it! We’ll start with some quick answers to the most common and important questions you might have.

Instaread Review Summary (FAQ)

• Is Instaread worth it? Instaread is a good Blinkist alternative. It has fewer summaries than Blinkist, but they are longer than a typical Blinkist book summary. On comparing the quality of the book summaries, some books are better summarized by Instaread, while some are better summarized by Blinkist. So yes, it’s worth it, but if you want to pick only one of the two apps, keep reading the full review below.

• Is Instaread free? Instaread isn’t free, but it comes with a risk-free 7-day trial. For more on pricing, see below.

• How much does Instaread cost? If you get a monthly subscription to Instaread, you’ll pay $8.99/month. If you go with the annual plan, you’ll save 12% and pay only $7.99/month. You can start a risk-free, 7-day trial here (affiliate link).

• Does Instaread have a good user experience and interface? Instaread comes with the minimum number of features you need to read or listen to book summaries. It’s not bloated with unnecessary features, and as a result, there is little to complain about regarding the user interface or experience. Once you get the hang of using the app, you’re good to go.

• Is Instaread available on Android? Instaread is available on the web, iOS, and Android. Whether you’re using a laptop, iPhone, or Android phone, there’s a version of Instaread tailored specific to your device!

• What are some Instaread alternatives? Blinkist is the top Instaread alternative, but there are many more apps out there, such as getAbstract, for example. We’ve reviewed both Blinkist and getAbstract, and now we’re reviewing Instaread to help you choose the best book summary app for your needs.

• What are the pros and cons of Instaread? Instaread provides in-depth book summaries in text and audio form. You can also buy audiobooks on the platform. Its unique feature is that it shows you “cards” as book quotes so you can easily review and remember the best ones from a book. The biggest con of using Instaread is that they have fewer books summaries than Blinkist or getAbstract.

Instaread Overview

Instaread is one of the top book summary apps on the market. It was founded in 2014. Despite the increasing number of book summary apps, it continues to stand out from the rest.

While most of the other apps only summarize nonfiction books, Instaread also covers fiction books. In addition, it provides Instaread Originals – exclusive summaries of a topic or a person. The other top unique feature of the app is its cards. Cards are the quotes from a book that you can save to review later.

Today, we’ll take an in-depth look at Instaread and how it differs from the other apps like Blinkist and getAbstract. Every app has its pros and cons, and this app is no different. In the end, you’ll walk away with the information you need to find out if Instaread is right for you.

If you want to skip the details and start your risk-free, 7-day trial right now, you can do so with the button below:

How does Instaread work?

Let’s kick off our Instaread review with the basics: Instaread is available on the web, iOS, and Android. If you can’t use either app for some reason (or don’t want to), the web version works well enough on most phones as well.

The app is free to install, but you’ll need either a subscription or a free trial to access its content. You can register using your email or by connecting your Facebook account.

The interface is minimal. Instaread hasn’t crammed their app with confusing features, so everything is simple for an average user. Let’s explore each feature of the app in detail.

As you log in, you’ll find 4 tabs at the bottom of your screen: Discover, Library, Search and Account. The discover tab is the default tab to appear when you launch the app and are logged in.

1. The Discover Tab

The discover tab of the app includes the following sections, one after another, as you scroll down.

• The Highlights

A selection of top summaries chosen by the Instaread team. They automatically scroll past one by one horizontally. You can also do it manually by swiping left or right.

• New

The latest titles uploaded on the app. You can view all of them by clicking “view all” or scroll horizontally to explore more without leaving the page.

• Popular

The most popular titles of the app among its users. As you scroll down further, you see more genres in the same fashion.

2. The Library Tab

The library tab shows you all the books you’ve engaged with. It includes the book summaries you’ve finished reading, the ones you are currently reading, and the books you’ve bookmarked.

There are two more sections in The Library:

• Full Audiobooks

You can find the audiobooks you’ve purchased through the app.

• Liked Cards

Liked cards is the collection of all the quote cards you like while reading the summary. We’ll explore how this works later in this review.

3. The Search Tab

The Search tab is straightforward. You can search for book summaries or audiobooks by their title, author or category.

4. My Account Tab

 

The Account tab is where you’ll find the general info you may need. You can suggest new books for the team to add, sync your iTunes account with the app, read the common questions about subscription, submit a support ticket, link your account with Facebook, and log out from here.

You’ll also find buttons to share the Instaread app with your friends, like them on Facebook, and follow them on Twitter.

Instaread Features

Next in our Instaread review, let’s walk through the experience of reading a book summary in the app. When you pick up a book summary, you can see the cover art, title and author.

As you scroll down, you can read a small preview to understand what the book is about.

Then, you’ll find the contents of the book summary, which consists of the following sections:

1. Overview

The introduction and the teaser of the book summary.

2. Key Insights

All the key insights listed in order. You can tap on any of them to jump directly to the content.

3. Important People

The info of the people who contributed to the book.

4. Author’s Style

It gives you more info about the author’s style of writing. It can help you make up your mind if you’re interested in buying the book.

4. Author’s Perspective

It describes the world-view of the author so you can have an objective understanding of where they are coming from. It helps you stay open-minded to come up with your own conclusions. This is a pretty unique and awesome twist that makes it easier to be more objective about what you read.

When you scroll back up again, you’ll see three buttons:

1. Read

You read the book summary one section at a time. If you prefer to read that way, you can also switch to dark mode.

You can jump to different parts of the summary. To do so, open the table of contents from the icon below and tapping the section you want to go to.

2. Listen

You can choose to listen to the book summary. You may also adjust the speed of the audio.

3. Cards

These are Tinder-like cards that you can swipe left or right. By doing so, you’ll build your own little collection of the best quotes from the book. You can revisit your liked cards from the library tab.

You can also download a book summary to read or listen to offline. Lastly, you can share the summaries on any platform you want.

Instaread Selection

Instaread comes with a great variety of categories and genres. It even has some special content formats, as you’ll see below. The general categories you can find in the app are:

• Business & Economics
• Self-Help
• History, Political & Social Science
• Health & Fitness
• Fiction
• Science
• Religion
• Arts & Entertainment
• Sports & Recreation
• Biographies
• Psychology
• Leadership & Management
• Personal Growth
• Diet & Nutrition
• Historical Fiction
• Literary Fiction
• Body, Mind & Spirit
• Medical
• United States
• Philosophy
• Romance
• Marketing & Sales
• Military
• Relationships
• Mystery
• Entrepreneurship
• Finance
• Parenting
• Christianity
• Reference
• Humor

You can also find the following specials:

• Instaread Originals

They summarize a concept or a person as Instaread Originals.

• Instaread Articles

They release summaries of articles from various publications and blogs like Harvard Business Review, The New York Times, Encyclopaedia Britannica, etc. This is a cool way to stay informed without spending a ton of time reading the news each day.

• Daily Insights

These are small, bite-sized ideas, lessons, and insights from the books.

What are the most popular books on Instaread?

Instaread regularly publishes new book summaries, even though it’s a small company. According to the app, below are the most popular summaries at the time of writing this review. You can access all of them with your free 7-day trial.

1. The 7 Habits of Highly Effective Teens: After the success of The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, Stephen Covey’s son, Sean Covey, did a great job writing a book on the same theme for teens.
2. Remote: This book tackles one of the biggest trends in the workplace, which is going remote instead of working from offices.
3. How to Develop Self-Confidence and Improve Public Speaking: A classic book from Dale Carnegie on being confident and speaking in public. These are the key skills you need to thrive in the professional world.
4. The Big Leap: A book on overcoming your self-imposed limitations and hidden fears. It will help you take the big leap you need to get your life to the next level.
5. Own the Day, Own Your Life: This book gives you science-backed tips, tactics, strategies, and routines to optimize waking up, working, learning, eating, training, playing, sleeping, and sex.
6. The Way of the Wolf: A great book on persuasion from Jordan Belfort, whose life was portrayed in the 2013 Hollywood film The Wolf of Wall Street.
7. The Art of Loving: The author argues that love is a skill like any other, a skill you need to learn and practice. It covers everything you need to increase your capacity for love.
8. The Infinite Game: Simon Sinek looks at everything in life as a game. He states that it’s important to know what game you’re playing in order to win it. It will change the way you look at life and lead or run a business.
9. Measure What Matters: The book is based on the goal-setting technique called “Objectives and Key Results” (OKRs). The method helps you identify what matters the most and shows you how to focus more on it.
10. Do Nothing: In a world where everyone is motivating you to do more, this book gives you permission to take a break and do nothing. The book highlights the importance of resting and shows you how resting helps your work.

Other than books, here is a list of all the Instaread Originals published on the app so far:

• Jack Dorsey
• Global Recessions
• Andrew Carnegie
• Pandemics
• Venture Capital
• Arianna Huffington
• Time Management
• Richard Branson
• Oprah Winfrey
• Growth Mindset
• Mindfulness
• Michael Bloomberg
• Gwyneth Paltrow
• Charisma
• Elon Musk
• The Data Trade
• Kylie Jenner
• Public Speaking
• Stephen Hawking
• Dark Money
• Rachel Hollis
• Tariffs
• Jeff Bezos
• Cryptocurrency
• The Gluten-Free Diet
• Sheryl Sandberg
• Habit Formation
• The Ketogenic Diet
• Howard Schultz
• Phil Knight
• Tim Ferriss
• Michael Lewis

How Much Does Instaread Cost? (Pricing and Plans)

Instaread comes with a free 7-day trial period which gives you full access to the app. Then, you pay $8.99 a month or $7.99 a month (if you pay yearly).

The price range is similar compared to Blinkist or getAbstract, but it depends on the plan you pick. On average, Instaread is cheaper than Blinkist or getAbstract, but the annual plans are quite close.

It also depends on whether you get a discount or not, which are available for most of these services regularly.

Instaread vs Blinkist

Since Blinkist is the most famous book summary app, let’s compare the two to find out the differences:

• Blinkist mostly focuses on nonfiction titles, while Instaread also covers fiction.
• Instaread has more content formats, like Instaread Originals, centered around a person or a topic, and Instaread Articles, collections of blogs from around the web. Blinkist only summarizes books.
• Blinkist has a huge catalog of summaries while Instaread has fewer summaries in comparison.
• On average, Blinkist’s summaries are shorter (10-15 minutes) while Instaread’s summaries are longer (20+ minutes). One could argue that Instaread provides more in-depth summaries, but it depends on the quality of insights. Sometimes, Instaread does a better job, while other times, Blinkist does it better.
• Instaread provides information about the authors and their perspective at the end of the summaries. Blinkist doesn’t have such sections.
• Instaread lets you save and review book quotes in the form of cards. Blinkist currently doesn’t have such a feature. However, Blinkist lets you highlight parts of a book summary that you can review later.
• Blinkist’s audio quality is superior to Instaread’s audio. Since Blinkist is a bigger company, they’re able to invest more into higher quality sound production, and it shows.
• Instaread feels simpler to use because of its minimalistic UI and UX. Its web version is also better than Blinkist. Using Instaread on the phone or the web is almost identical. Using Blinkist on the web is a different experience from using it on the phone. For example, you can’t increase the speed of the audio on the web version of Blinkist as of now.
• If you buy a monthly subscription, Instaread is cheaper than Blinkist. Instaread is $8.99 a month, while Blinkist is $14.99 a month. If you buy a yearly subscription, Blinkist will be slightly cheaper. Paid annually, Instaread comes in at $7.99/month, whereas Blinkist lands at $7.49/month.

If you still aren’t sure which one is right for you, both apps offer a 7-day free trial. You can sign up for both, compare them directly, and then keep whichever membership you enjoy the most.

To start a free trial of Blinkist, including a 35% discount if you keep your subscription, go here. To start a free trial of Instaread, go here.

Using the apps is the best way to compare and find out which one feels right for you.

Final Verdict: Should You Use Instaread?

Instaread is one of the top book summary apps. It continues to improve and manages to release new, high-quality book summaries on a consistent basis. Instaread is right for you if:

• You like to read long, in-depth summaries of books, structured based on key insights. You’re interested in learning more about the authors and their unique perspectives.
• You not only want to read nonfiction book summaries but also fiction book summaries, Instaread Originals, Instaread Articles, and Daily Insights. All of these are distinct formats, as we explained earlier in this review.
• You enjoy swiping through book quote cards and getting smarter in little bites – it’s a bit like Tinder for your brain! Your saved cards are available for you to review at any time.
• You want a minimalistic book summary app with a good but not overwhelming selection and a simple user experience.

New book summary apps come and go, but Instaread has proven it’s here to stay. Ultimately, it’s your decision which app is right for you. We gave you the facts so you’re best-equipped to make the right choice for yourself.

Instaread and Blinkist can both be a great addition to your lifelong learning journey. You can even use both and switch between them whenever you want to maximize variety!

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Other Reviews

Looking for our other reviews of the most popular book summary apps, tools, and services? Here’s a list of all the reviews we’ve published so far:

How good is the Blinkist app? Is it useful? What does it feel like as a paying customer? And what about pricing? Does it hold up against other book summary services? The goal of my Blinkist review is to answer all those questions for you and more.

If you prefer to watch a video, you can see my live walkthrough of the Blinkist app below. This includes an analysis of its pros and cons and the price.

For an extensive review of the Blinkist app in written form, read on below or jump to any section using this table of contents:

If you want to come back to it at any time, just hit the little up arrow icon on the bottom right corner of this page.

If you want more information about Blinkist the company, details of individual features, and a walkthrough of the web app and how it feels compared to the app, check out my Blinkist Explainer Guide.

For this review, we’ll start with a quick summary where I give you brief answers to the most important questions.

Quick Summary of My Blinkist Review (FAQ)

• Is Blinkist app free? Yes, but as a free user, you can only read “the daily pick,” which is a random book summary.
• What’s it like to use Blinkist app? The user experience is simple, easy, and fast, thanks to Blinkist’s minimalistic interface, focused features, and sleek design. It’s geared towards reading and listening, which are its main use cases.
• Does Blinkist work offline? Yes. The summaries you add to your library will automatically be downloaded in text format. You can also download audios, even automatically, and delete them again after you’re done listening.
• How many books are on Blinkist? There are over 7,000 books in the Blinkist library and the team adds about 40 new titles per month.
• How much does Blinkist cost? The monthly pricing is $12.99, but if you buy the annual plan, you’ll get 50% off. If you use an affiliate link like ours, however, you can get another 35% off, putting the final price at $4.33 per month (that’s less than $0.15 per day). You can do so here.
• Is Blinkist worth the money? I think so. It’s the cheapest book summary service in absolute terms, costs less than a coffee a day (or in some places even a month!), offers great value for the money, and beats most free book summary sites.

What are the Pros and Cons of Reading Book Summaries (in General)?

When reviewing a tool or service, most people immediately jump into what they like and don’t like. That’s a mistake, especially when looking at one of many services in a particular category. In this case, book summaries.

The concept of a book summary itself has some specific advantages and disadvantages. Naturally, these will transfer to Blinkist and any other book summary service. You can’t really blame a particular company for them.

Let’s first look at those, so we can better pinpoint the unique pros and cons of Blinkist later.

Pros of reading book summaries:

1. You’ll skip all unnecessary information. This is especially helpful for books that only make one or a few good points. It also helps you avoid poor books altogether.
2. You can learn about more and different topics faster. Instead of being stuck on one book about meditation for a month, you can read a summary in a few minutes. Then, you can jump to the next mindfulness book or a new topic altogether.
3. You’ll likely remember more without taking notes. Since book summaries center around facts and short ways to illustrate them, you’ll likely come away from one summary with 3-5 things you’ll remember. If you read a full book without taking notes, it’s hard to properly memorize anything.

Cons of reading book summaries:

1. You’ll lose most of the story and humor of the book. This is bad, because it makes reading fun. Depending on how much you connect with the story, it also helps you remember a lot, even if you might have to take notes.
2. You will miss out on big ideas and spontaneous insights from truly great books. The best books hit hard with every page. It’s impossible to transfer all of their knowledge into a summary. Some books you just have to read in full to get the most out of them.
3. Due to a lack of context, you might interpret facts the wrong way. Sometimes, a summary states an idea one way, whereas the context of the book sets it up in another. But because that context is now missing, you’re interpreting the idea differently and thus get an impression the author didn’t want you to have.
4. You are now trusting not just the author of the book, but also whoever wrote the summary. If the summary writer does a bad job, you lose. For example, they might fail to include an important story and so you won’t remember a crucial fact.

Again, these apply to all book summaries and the services that provide them. So with those in mind, let’s turn our attention to the Blinkist app user experience.

How Does It Feel to Use the Blinkist App?

First, the Blinkist app is available for both iPhone and Android. Downloading the app is free. You can sign up using your email address or Facebook account. When you open the app for the first time, you’ll get a short tutorial of how everything works.

One of the first things you’ll notice is that the app only has three tabs for you to choose from:

1. Discover. This is where you can explore their library and find new titles.
2. Library. Here, you’ll have access to your personal selection of books.
3. You. This is where your settings and saved highlights are.

This is brilliant, because it makes navigating the app and choosing what to do really easy. Let’s look at the individual tabs.

1. The Discover Tab

There are seven ways to find new book summaries inside the Blinkist app:

1. You can search for a specific title, author, or keyword.
2. The Daily Minute is a short introduction to the free book summary of the day.
3. You can browse their 27 categories.
4. The app generates personalized reading recommendations for you.
5. There are multiple curated book lists from experts and authors.
6. Trending blinks are what’s popular right now.
7. The “New” section shows you the most recently added titles.

Since they have multiple ways of exploring, you can both find specific books and topics you’re looking for and randomly find new things.

2. The Library Tab

This is the central tab, the main view, the homepage, if you will. Your library is a list of all the summaries you’ve saved to read, which you can do in all discover modes using the ⨁ (plus) icon.

You’ll see a blue progress bar for all the books you’ve started and a green bar for all the ones you’ve completed. You can also filter your library for only audiobooks and by how much progress you’ve made. Finally, you can sort it by the books you’ve most recently added, opened, how much progress you’ve made, and alphabetically.

You can even create your own tagging system, save books as favorites on your profile, or download the audio for any book with one tap. The text summaries of all books in your library will be downloaded automatically, so you can always read them offline.

Here, you will also see a small, dark blue banner at the bottom, prompting you to continue reading your last summary where you left off. The library is from where you’ll start most of your reading journeys inside the app.

3. The You Tab

This tab is a very simplistic profile. It only shows a list of your favorite books (which you control via the ❤︎ (heart) button or by using the three dots icon in your library) and your highlights.

Your favorites list is a way to filter books even more, but I personally don’t use this feature, as I find the library does enough of that.

Your highlights are sorted by book and, if you tap on one, you’ll see which blink each one is from. You can also share them directly to Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp, email, and many other services from here.

Finally, this is where you’ll find your settings. You can switch languages (they have German and English), activate email notifications for the Daily Minute, and choose how you want to download audios. There’s an option to auto-download, to turn off mobile data for it, and even to auto-delete audios after you’re done listening.

This also where you can sync your profile with your Evernote account and connect your Kindle. The first allows you to save all your highlights in an Evernote notebook and make them searchable. With the second you can send book summaries to your Kindle, save them forever, and take them anywhere.

As you can see, moving around the app is very easy to do thanks to its structure. Let’s see how it feels to use the main features: reading and audio.

What are the Main Features of the Blinkist App?

There really are only two use cases for the Blinkist app: reading summaries and listening to them. But what does that look and feel like?

1. Reading book summaries

When you tap on a book inside your library, you’ll see a brief overview along with the option to either read it or listen to it. If you tap on “Read,” you’ll be taken to the first ‘blink,’ which is what Blinkist calls the pages of their summaries. It describes what you can get out of reading the summary.

Then, you can swipe from one key highlight to the next. You’ll see a progress bar at the bottom and you can highlight any part of the text that speaks to you. There’s also a table of contents, a toggle to adjust the font size or switch to white-on-black mode (rather than the default black-on-white), and a button to quickly switch to audio mode.

In between blinks, you’ll sometimes see nuggets of wisdom from the book, which is a nice goodie. The final blink is always a summary with some actionable advice. Then, you can mark the title as finished and go back to your library. Easy peasy!

2. Listening to audio book summaries

When you hit “Listen” in the book overview, you’ll go to the audio player. The blinks of that book will now play one after another until you’ve finished the whole summary.

You can also enable autoplay at the bottom of the screen, which will proceed to play all the books from your library in a row. If you swipe left, you can change the order of books in your queue, too. When you enable “Offline mode,” the app will only play audios you’ve previously downloaded.

The audio player itself is very easy to understand. The key takeaway of each blink is shown in the middle and the controls allow you to skip 15 seconds forward and backward, as well as increase or decrease speed. The minimum is half speed, the maximum is twice as fast. That’s it, plain and simple, just like using Spotify or your phone’s standard music player!

Recap: User Experience on Blinkist

Blinkist truly wants to save you some time. You can feel it. The design is very minimalistic, and that’s on purpose. Everything is concise and to the point. They don’t give you many options and that’s a good thing.

In fact, they’ve removed several features from previous versions, and I think it serves a purpose. Blinkist wants you to be focused on one thing and one thing only: learning from books through reading and listening.

That’s why there are no cluttered sidebars, no fancy buttons, no advertisements. The user interface reminds me of Medium. It’s extremely focused on giving you the best reading and listening experience possible. Nothing more, nothing less.

This also means navigation is easy, you can hardly do anything wrong or go somewhere you don’t want to be inside the app. Loading times are fast, both on the phone and web app, and thanks to offline reading and downloading audios, you don’t even need an internet connection at all times.

So much for the user experience. Now let’s talk pros and cons.

What are the Pros & Cons of the Blinkist App Specifically?

Now that you know what it feels like to use the app, let’s talk about some of its ups and downs. Again, remember that all book summaries have advantages and disadvantages, but these are specific to Blinkist’s service:

Pros of using the Blinkist app:

1. The book summaries are complete. You don’t get just a few ideas or important concepts from a book, you get all of them.
2. It’s very easy to consume content and learn. The app is simple to use, convenient to navigate, and a child could figure out how to access the main features, reading and listening, within minutes.
3. Highlighting helps a lot with remembering facts from summaries. This is an underrated feature, as it can make a big difference in how much information you retain, but you also have to use it to get the benefits.
4. The audio experience on Blinkist is seamless. You tap, it plays, you listen. Perfect for learning during long workouts, your commute to work, or while cooking or cleaning your house.

Cons of using the Blinkist app:

1. Humor and most emotion are stripped away almost completely from the book. Some writers make a point to capture some of the book’s unique spirit in their summary. Blinkist doesn’t, it’s very geared towards facts.
2. Reading many summaries in a row can feel repetitive and boring. That’s mostly because of the lack of story, and it’s why I’d recommend reading 1-2 summaries a day, no more.
3. Some summaries are too short for the book they represent. I’ve come across summaries that only had three or four blinks, but the actual book was really long. I suspect those will miss many important points.
4. There is no scrutiny towards individual books. The Blinkist team doesn’t review, critique, rank, or fact-check any of the books. That means these jobs are still yours to do.

I’ll give you my final thoughts on how these weigh against one another at the end of this review, but for now, I’ll let you be the judge.

Next, let’s look at some of the content itself so we can get an idea of how useful the service might be for you.

What are the Best Books on Blinkist?

The single best way to get a feel for the content on Blinkist is to read today’s free summary. You can also listen to the audio. You’ll find both here. That said, here are 10 of Blinkist’s all-time most popular titles so you can see what kind of books they have:

1. The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen R. Covey. This all-time classic describes seven habits most successful people share and how to form them in your own life.
2. Getting Things Done by David Allen. The default manifesto on productivity. A simple system with a few hard and fast rules to help you do your work.
3. Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman. In this book, you’ll learn about cognitive biases and how they shape – and sometimes distort – our perception and decisions.
4. The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg. This is one of the best books on making and breaking habits there is. Thanks to Duhigg’s habit loop, you can identify and change your behavior in the ways that you want.
5. The 4-Hour Workweek by Tim Ferriss. If you want to be an entrepreneur, this is for you. Tim describes how he built, automated, and later even sold his company. More importantly, he gives you the tools and tactics to create your own in a way that funds your lifestyle without taking too much time.
6. Influence by Robert Cialdini. One of the best books on how to interact and build relationships with other people. You can use this book to find friends, get a promotion, or find a compromise with your spouse.
7. Drive by Daniel Pink. Pink dissects what motivates us, which is really helpful in finding work you love.
8. Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell. By analyzing a few extreme cases, Gladwell manages to deliver a template of why products, ideas, and people are successful – or not.
9. Mindset by Carol Dweck. There are two main ways to look at the world: you can either try and learn from everything (a growth mindset) or accept everything as is (a fixed mindset). Dweck helps us go from one to the other.
10. Flow by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. One of the best books on creativity and happiness. It explains why we enjoy the activities we enjoy and helps us do more of them.

If you sign up for a free, 7-day trial, you can read all of the above. You can also get a sneak peek at their content by reading their free summaries on Four Minute Books. You can find them all in our index of book summaries.

Recap: How Useful Is the Blinkist App?

Blinkist has over 7,000 books in its database. The selection is also growing at about 40 books per month. That’s a true all-you-can-read buffet of book summaries. No matter whether you want to learn about growth hacking, stoicism, economics, entrepreneurship, habits, mindfulness, happiness, love, biology, history, or food, you will find the right book.

What’s more, thanks to cutting out the fluff, but giving you all the important ideas of a book, Blinkist also lets you decide what you want to learn from a book and how much. You can get just the main concept from a book like The One Thing, or browse all blinks and see how many sound new to you. If you find many interesting things, you can still buy the book. If not, you can be done with it or return to it later.

The purpose of Blinkist is to give you a factual analysis of the core message of a book, along with all its important points. And it really delivers on that promise. Therefore, you can use Blinkist both as a complement and supplement to books. Get the best ideas from books not worth reading in full and screen great ones before you commit to them.

Okay, time for the money talk. How expensive is this service?

How Much Does Blinkist Cost?

First, the Blinkist app is free to download and install. But with a free account, you can only read one summary each day: the daily pick. This is a set of randomly chosen blinks, so you can’t control what you’re reading. Full access requires a Premium subscription.

Blinkist offers a monthly and an annual plan.

For $12.99 per month (or the same amount in €, if you’re in Europe), you get unlimited access to their content. That includes over 7,000 titles, including audio versions, shortcasts (summaries of podcasts), offline reading and downloading, highlighting, as well as the ability to sync your highlights to Evernote or send summaries straight to your Kindle. That’s less than $0.50 per day and pretty cheap if you consider the “skill” you’re getting in return. But wait!

On the annual plan, you get 50% off, which means you’ll pay only $6.67 (or €) per month. That’s a steep discount. Even if you just use the app for six months, it’ll have paid for itself. Can it get any better? Actually, yes, it can.

Four Minute Books is a Blinkist affiliate, meaning we can give you another 35% off if you use our link. In return, we’ll receive a commission for referring you to Blinkist as a customer. In the end, you’ll pay just $4.33 per month – less than $0.15 per day!

How Much Does Blinkist Offer Compared to Other Book Summary Services?

Generally speaking, there are two kinds of book summary services.

First, there are those offering free book summaries, like we do on Four Minute Books. This usually means affiliate links to the actual books are included in the content. Often, it’s just one or a few people running the site and sharing their notes.

Second, there are paid book summary services, like Blinkist. These either charge you per summary or you’ll have to pay a monthly fee to access all their titles. Usually, it’ll be a team creating the content in multiple formats.

We wrote an in-depth article looking at the 8 best Blinkist alternatives overall, but for now, let’s look at some of the most popular ones in both categories and how they stack up against Blinkist.

Blinkist Alternatives (Free Book Summary Services)

• Optimize by Heroic. Brian Johnson used to run Optimize.me as a paid service. Over 250,000+ people use it. However, he recently raised money, turned his company into a B Corp (a public benefit for-profit corporation), and made the app free! Before, it used to be ~$100/year. Optimize offers over 600 Philosopher’s Notes, structured 6-page PDFs of some of the world’s best titles. It also includes audios, videos, and a lot more. Great free book summary app!
• The Power Moves. Lucio is incredibly dedicated to objectivity and putting out quality content. I didn’t count the number of summaries in his list, but it seems to be the only free one that rivals our nearly 500 titles.
• NJlifehacks. Nils and Jonas are great, positive guys, and they put a lot of hard work into their writing. They even create custom images for their summaries. Awesome!
• Actionable Books. With over 1,000 summaries, this is technically the largest list, but the articles don’t really feel like summaries. They all share just one big idea and then two more random insights. I’m not convinced of this structure. I know our own 3-lesson format is sometimes limited, but this even more so.
• James Clear. King James barely needs an introduction. He’s one of the most prolific researchers and writers on the science of habits. He’s summarized many popular books in 3 sentences.
• Sam Thomas Davies. I’ve known Sam for years now, and he dissects the psychology of our brains like no other. He also has 100+ book summaries which he’s organized perfectly by category.
• Nat Eliason. Nat is one of the great experimenters of our time, covering everything from health to tech to sex to entrepreneurship. His book notes are more like highlights, but combined with his ratings they’re very useful.
• Derek Sivers. After selling his business, Derek is now living a quiet life as a thinker, writer, developer, musician, and whatever else he wants to be. He has notes on over 250 books too. Respect!

Other free services, like Spark Notes, CliffNotes, and WikiSummaries are more concerned with textbooks and classic literature, to help you study for school.

Considering you only get one summary per day as a free Blinkist user, many other services offer far more free content. At the same time, these services rarely provide summaries that are as complete or in-depth as Blinkist’s, precisely because they are free. Often, they also have less content overall, as Blinkist’s team of 60+ people can put out way more summaries than any one- or two-person blog.

If you’re only reading a few summaries a month or don’t care about the randomness of Blinkist’s daily pick, free might do the trick for you. But if you want more, a paid service is the way to go.

Blinkist Alternatives (Paid Book Summary Services)

• Headway. This is a relatively new app, offering bite-sized learning in a variety of formats. They only launched in 2019 but already boast over 12 million users, making them a serious Blinkist competitor. By using a combination of quotes, summaries, audio, and graphics, they make it really easy for you to make learning a habit. At $90/year, it costs about the same as Blinkist.
• Shortform. A few years ago, I saw a guy named Allen Cheng post incredibly detailed book summaries on his blog. Now, his work has become the foundation of Shortform, a full-scale book summary service trying to offer the most detailed, chapter-by-chapter book summaries of them all. You can read our full review of Shortform here.
• Instaread. Another solid Blinkist competitor with over 2,000 books summarized, a sleek-looking app and format, and a nice level of depth and storytelling to their content. It’s about the same price as Blinkist too, and has some neat goodies like swiping left and right on quotes from books. Read our full review here.
• getAbstract. With over 18,000 books, this is probably the biggest book summary service in the world. They have a cool student offering (free for one year, then 59 €/year), but the regular Pro and Enterprise licenses are really expensive (299 € and more per year). You can read our in-depth review of them here.
• Uptime. This app offers 5-minute knowledge hacks for books, courses, documentaries, and even podcasts in extremely creative reading, listening, and watching formats. Starts from just $4/month! Read our detailed review here.
• Readitfor.me. This service is more geared towards busy professionals with its 12-minute video summaries and audios. It also costs $19/month, or $29/month if you want access to their masterclasses.
• FlashBooks. I’m not sure how many summaries this service has, but at $29/month after a $1-trial-week, it’s definitely expensive.
• Readingraphics. This service takes a more visual approach to reading with infographics for each books. However, for $19/month you only get 3 new summaries, which is a high price per piece of content.
• Scribd. Scribd aggregates and summarizes all kinds of content, from audiobooks to books to magazines to research papers. They also often host full-version PDFs of the originals. You can read our in-depth review here.

My friend Prakhar created a great list of even more services and tools, but I think these are the most relevant ones. If you ask me, Instaread and getAbstract are the best alternatives to Blinkist, as they have a similar, if slightly more expensive price-to-value ratio, not factoring in any discounts. Optimize is probably the best free alternative.

If you want to learn from multiple books a week or even a day, I think Blinkist offers the best value for the money.

Recap: Is Blinkist worth it?

To figure out whether you should pay for a subscription, I like this thought experiment:

Imagine you could buy the skill of being able to read one book every single day. Just like in The Matrix, it’s uploaded right into your brain. How much would that skill be worth to you? $1,000? $10,000? $100,000? Whatever your number is, that’s what Blinkist should be worth to you.

Because with a Blinkist Premium subscription, you’re essentially acquiring this skill overnight. Instead of wasting lots of time on bad books and procrastinating on reading, you’ll read one set of blinks and digest all of the core ideas of an entire book in 15-20 minutes. Meanwhile, colleges charge $200,000 for a degree in which they barely teach you anything.

In my town, Munich in Germany, some cafés charge $7 or more for a single cappuccino or latte. Yet, for less than that, I can get a full month of access to over 7,000 book summaries and audios, all designed to do only one thing: make me smarter.

At $0.15/day, I pay ten times the money for my daily coffee. Maybe, you are too. If that’s not a no-brainer, I don’t know what is. 

Thanks to Blinkist, you’ll save lots of time, be able to learn in situations where you usually couldn’t, remember more, and soak up knowledge about new topics faster. The pros easily outweigh the cons. Given that it is the cheapest book summary service in absolute terms, and offers great value for the money, I think Blinkist is worth paying for.

Conclusion: My Blinkist Review

Let’s briefly recap each section.

First, the user experience inside the Blinkist app is brilliant. It loads fast, the minimalistic design is simple to understand, it syncs between all your devices and you can always pick up right where you left off. The app gently steers you towards its two only true use cases: reading and listening to summaries of books.

Second, the Blinkist app is extremely useful and its pros outweigh its cons. Sure, the summaries are mostly fact-based and some of them aren’t perfect, but thanks to their completeness, you can pick up tons of ideas in a short time. Since the reading and listening experience is flawless, you’ll also remember a lot of what you read.

Third, Blinkist offers huge value for the money and is the cheapest book summary service in absolute terms. With over 7,000 summaries in its library and a price of only $0.15/day, Blinkist outshines most competitors. They have more content than most free summary sites and are cheaper than all other paid services. But even judged on its own, it’s an investment in yourself you won’t regret.

Here’s my final verdict: Use Blinkist as an extension of your usual reading and a complement to it, not a replacement.

You can skip the fluff of books with only a few good ideas, learn via audio in situations where you can’t read a book, and screen great titles before committing to reading them in full. That’s what this app is perfect for. If you read 1-2 summaries per day, you’ll also greatly speed up your learning overall. I highly recommend you sign up.

Whatever you do, I’m grateful you read this review and I hope Four Minute Books will help you become smarter.

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Other Reviews

Looking for our other reviews of the most popular book summary apps, tools, and services? Here’s a list of all the reviews we’ve published so far: