The Next Chapter of Readwise — Our Own Reading App

From Readwise — go to the original.

Kyle’s notes while reading/watching, verbatim from the Roam daily note.

Notes

• The Next Chapter of Readwise: Our Own Reading App Readwise #Reading
• We’ve made some meaningful steps since: thousands of customers, hundreds of millions of highlights, and more.
• It embeds powerful workflows to help you conquer content overload — one of the most acute pain points of read-it-later power users.
• We’re now in position to reimagine aspects of the digital reading experience itself, from how you annotate a document, to how you navigate. Readwise as you know it today isn’t going anywhere, but this is our future.
• When people categorize books, they typically divide them into either fiction and nonfiction. This kind of works, but what about blog posts? Newsletters? Long-form journalism? Twitter threads? Journal articles?
• Fiction versus nonfiction now seems outdated so we’ve adopted an alternative dichotomy: “reading for entertainment” versus “reading for betterment”.
• Reading for betterment, on the other hand, is where we see the opportunity for software to improve reading by an order of magnitude.
• Reading for betterment can be pleasurable, but pleasure is not the ultimate intent. Instead, there is a deeper purpose. This might be to expand the boundaries of knowledge through original research; to become a more eloquent speaker; to inquire into the meaning of life; or to simply internalize a memo for work.
• Perhaps the most famous call to arms was Vannevar Bush’s As We May Think, published in 1945, in which he imagined a memory expanding device called the memex. There have been several such futurists since: from Douglas Engelbart and Ted Nelson at the dawn of personal computing, to Alvin Toffler and Stewart Brand at the dawn of the internet, to Kevin Kelly and Andy Matuschak today.
• Why are we flooded with a deluge of books, articles, and papers? Why doesn’t software help us decide what to read now, what to read later, and what to read never?
• Why do we still spend 10 hours reading a book only to forget nearly everything we understood in the moment? Why doesn’t software help us internalize those things we want to apply to our personal and work lives?
• This set off a brief period during the late 2000s when it seemed like reading technology was set to flourish. During this time we saw the advent of Kindle, Pocket, Instapaper, Google Reader, Goodreads, and others. But looking back, it’s now obvious that this era was truly about controlling the Distribution of content in the new mobile-first world rather than advancing the practice of reading itself.
• It’s safe to say that Bezos wasn’t so focused on Whispersync because he thought this would somehow improve the practice of reading. Instead, he knew the connectivity would be key to extending Amazon’s Distribution advantage to the digital world.
• One framework we’ve found especially helpful to structure such product discussions is to separate reading into three components: before, during, and after you read.
• If we can build software that helps you be twice as effective in each of these stages — choose twice as efficiently before you read, comprehend twice as deeply while you read, and retain twice as much after you read — the compounded effect will be the Thielian 10x improvement we’re shooting for.
• From a theoretical perspective, the best way to start growing more in any domain is to first lose less.
• If you want to fill a leaky bucket, you first need to stop the leak. If you want to get more out of reading, you first need to forget less.
• A key feature of Vannevar Bush’s memex — imagined 76 years ago — was easy, instantaneous search of everything you’ve ever read. Why we can’t do this already, we have no idea. #memex
• There’s one pain point we hear more than any other from our users and it’s that they’re drowning in too much content with not enough time.
• Bundling and Unbundling
  • There’s a lot of chatter around bundling and unbundling lately. These conversations generally focus on unbundling old-line media providers. For example, the unbundling of cable television by broadband internet paired with more targeted streaming services. Or the unbundling of newspapers and magazines by Craigslist and direct-to-consumer newsletter subscriptions.
  • Bundling and unbundling can also refer to features and functionality. As Benedict Evans observes, there was a time when cars didn’t come with windshield wipers, turn signals, or radios. You had to buy the base vehicle and then install those options after market. Similarly, there was a time when spreadsheet software didn’t come with printing, graphing, or word counts. Those were separate apps you had to buy individually.
  • Features that were once optional sometimes become essential. This is the situation we see in reading tech right now. Our users are stitching together two, three, four, sometimes seven different apps across all their devices to take their reading digital. An RSS feed reader. A PDF viewer. A read-it-later app. A web highlighter extension. Readwise. And so on.
• You would think that the more you use one of these apps, the better it would get. Instead, the experience steadily degrades causing would-be power users to churn after a few weeks or months. Why? Because most of us save more things than we can actually get through. As a result, your inbox runneth over, turning your digital garden into a digital graveyard. Digital Gardens
• Like Venkatesh Rao, we remain optimistic that the solution is not to “smash your smart phone and go live in a log cabin to reclaim your attention and your life from being hacked by evil social media platforms.” Indeed, we believe that the same technology that undermines our attention can be harnessed for the opposite effect. #Distraction
• When describing something new, it’s sometimes helpful to not only speak in terms of what it is, but also what it is not. Accordingly, let us set forth some product objectives we are explicitly NOT trying to achieve with the Readwise reading app — “nongoals”, as Joel Spolsky would say. Non-Goals
• As entrepreneurs, there’s no business that’d be more lucrative than pulling off a new social network. But despite the constant cries for something like this on Twitter, we think it’s a classic case of worse is better. You couldn’t invent Figma before Sketch and Illustrator nailed the single-player vector-based experience. So it is with reading software. Or so our theory goes.
• As toolmakers, we see so much low hanging fruit in single-player mode that we can hardly fathom multiplayer.
• We do believe summaries, auto-categorizations, and social chatter can augment your reading experience. But we don’t believe these should be the product itself or serve as a substitute for reading the primary source. We want to help you go deep into what matters. Not skim along the surface. #Blinkist
• “The best products map to how customers think about their workflow… They choose the right atomic concepts. These are the core concepts around which the entire product is built. They not only align with how customers think of their workflow, but often crystallizes for customers how they ought to. Great atomic concepts are honed and then extended and built upon in more complex compounds that…well for lack of a better word…compound.” Kevin Kwok
• This speed is testament to Martin Fowler’s Design Stamina Hypothesis that when you find the right abstractions, you can move quickly without constantly painting yourself into a corner. Product Development Roam Brainstorm