tl;dr. Actually no, the results will probably not surprise you. After analyzing data from 2,074 testers, we found no evidence that Bionic Reading has any positive effect on reading speed. In fact, participants read 2.6 words per minute slower on average with Bionic Reading than without. That…
July 2022: The results of this experiment have been posted here. tl;dr As a hackathon project at our recent team offsite, Mati and I hacked together a quick experiment to test whether Bionic Reading actually works. Initial results suggest not, but there are some glimmers in the data justifying…
It's been a few months since we announced our work on Reader so we figured it’s time for an update on our progress, timelines, and the private beta! 💪 Progress When we announced Reader, we had just crossed a product milestone we called read-it-later parity. Basically, we had a read-it-later…
Our mission here at Readwise is to improve the practice of reading through software by an order of magnitude. This sounded just as ambitious when we originally wrote it in 2018, but we’ve made some meaningful steps since: thousands of customers, hundreds of millions of highlights, and more. Today,…
When we first started working on Readwise in 2017, the idea of applying “spaced repetition” to your reading highlights was — shall we say — met with skepticism. Few had heard the term spaced repetition back then, and even fewer believed we could build a consumer software product around it.…
We’ve been quietly shipping all kinds of new features throughout 2020. Aside from wishing you & yours a merry conclusion to this crazy year, we want to make sure you're taking full advantage of everything Readwise has to offer! Let’s get into it: 🎨 Readwise Brand — Believe it or…
One of my favorite scenes in The Matrix is when Tank the operator hooks up Neo to a brain-computer interface and starts uploading all kinds of skills directly into his mind. In seconds, Neo becomes a kung fu master. I've always imagined nonfiction books to be kind of like those…
Today we're excited to announce our first step in a bold new direction: active recall. Readwise already uses spaced repetition to help you remember more of what you've read. Active recall will take your retention to the next level. What is active recall? Active recall testing (also known as quizzing,…
If you're anything like me, you take reading seriously. Why? Because I view reading as an investment in myself. I'm investing capital today (time) in the skills and knowledge (dividends) I want tomorrow. Or as Kevan Lee put it in this excellent Buffer post: "I look at books as…
When it comes to eating healthily, we've all heard the saying: You are what you eat. It turns out, the same is true for reading: You are what you read. In the same way that you want to nourish your body with only high-quality, nutritious foods, you also want to…