Welcome to Readwise Reader! We know walkthrough guides tend to be boring, so we've laced ours with spicy memes to keep those dopamine receptors firing while we subliminally demonstrate the basics of this software. Reading is serious, but we hope you don't mind a little fun.
Keyboard shortcuts
The first thing you should know is that Reader is premium software built with power users in mind. This shows up in several ways, but the first thing you might notice is that you can do almost everything with your keyboard. You can even read, highlight, and annotate without touching the mouse!
If you’re on your computer rather than your phone (see below), try using the ↑ and ↓ arrow keys to move the purple focus indicator.
Now try focusing the animated gif of Antonio Banderas below and tapping h to highlight the focused paragraph.
That's right: Reader enables you to highlight images in addition to text! And those highlighted images, like all highlights in Reader, are synced with and resurfaced in Readwise and your note-taking app of choice.
You can always use the shortcut z to undo any action in Reader, which lets you move quickly without fear of making mistakes. This undo has memory so you can undo several steps in reverse.
Those left and right sidebars in this reading view (the table of contents and context panel, respectively) are cool at the beginning of the document, but interfere once you truly begin a focused reading session. Try tapping [ and ] to hide them.
Now try tapping n to both highlight and start a note on the focused paragraph. When the side panels are hidden, those annotations will appear as beautiful marginalia. When they’re open, your annotations will be compressed inline.
There are lots more keyboard shortcuts than these. You can typically discover them by hovering the action with your mouse pointer, pulling open the Command Palette (Cmd/Ctrl + K), or tapping ? for the quick reference.
Let's keep going.
Supported document types
Reader brings all your reading into one place, no matter the format. This means you can save both traditional media formats such as web articles, RSS feeds, email newsletters, PDFs, and EPUBs, as well as new media formats such as X/Twitter posts, YouTube videos, and podcast transcripts.
But in order to do this, you first need to learn how to save documents. Let’s go over the most popular methods.
Browser extension
By far, the best way to save things to Reader is the browser extension. So we recommend you install the extension to your browser of choice right now (Chrome, Firefox, Safari) and pin it to your browser’s address bar. Whenever you're on an article you want to read, tap the yellow extension icon to save it to Reader.
In addition to saving documents to Reader, this browser extension has one massive bonus feature.
It's also a web highlighter.
This means you can optionally highlight the native web page. And those highlights will bidirectionally sync with Reader.
Why might you use the web highlighter instead of the Reader apps? A couple reasons:
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First, although we expect you’ll generally prefer our clean, distraction-free reading experience, there are some exceptions where the original site is more pleasing. In these cases, you can honor the OP and read as they intended.
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Second, although our parsing is at the frontier of the read-it-later category, we'll never be able to parse 100% of the internet, 100% perfectly. HTML and CSS are just too flexible. The web highlighter is our exception handler.
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Third, sometimes you find yourself reading an article and want to take a highlight but not break your flow. Just activate the highlighter, make your highlight, and keep reading.
Mobile apps
In addition to installing the browser extension on your computer, the next thing you should do is install the iOS app or Android app if you haven’t already. You can then save documents to Reader by tapping the share button and then selecting Reader.
The mobile app should be fairly self-explanatory, but here are a couple pro tips.
Double tap to highlight. The mobile analog of using the keyboard shortcut h to highlight an entire paragraph is double tapping. If you're reading this on mobile, try double tapping this paragraph. It's awesome. You can then tap the highlight to resize or add an annotation such as a note or tag.
Text-to-speech. You can listen to any document using lifelike text-to-speech voices. You can do this on both web and mobile, but it’s especially popular in the mobile apps. To start, tap the Play button in the top right while reading.
Quick lookup. Long press any word or phrase to lookup its meaning. Define provides a definition like you would find in a dictionary; Lookup provides an internal definition like you would find in a Glossary; and Translate provides the equivalent in any target language you choose. Try selecting the word Ghostreader below to see for yourself.
Ghostreader. You can use Ghostreader to ask quick questions of an LLM without having to switch to an app like ChatGPT or Claude and disrupt your reading flow. The responses are grounded in the current document and aware of your position.
Swipes. In the list views, you can action individual items using both left & right and short & long swipes. You can customize these on the Settings page.
Text-to-speech
We touched on text-to-speech (TTS) above, but it’s become such a beloved feature that it deserves its own section.
When we first started working on Reader, we didn’t expect TTS to be so core. We also didn’t realize how bimodal the usage would be. To this day, some users tell us TTS is the most important thing we can be working on while others write in with messages like "I don't understand this. I wish you would prioritize other things."
If you're in skeptical camp, we were too. We identify as readers, after all, not listeners. But our entire team has come around, so allow us to share what we've discovered:
First, hands-free listening is particularly well-suited for consuming so-called “low information density” content. If you've got a queue of ~5 minute news articles and press releases that don’t require your fullest attention, you might try listening to them while walking, driving, dishwashing, or folding laundry.
Second, you can still read the document with your eyes while also listening with your ears. This is sometimes referred to as immersion reading. It's kind of a sensory deprivation technique enabling you to quickly ramp into a flow state which would otherwise take several minutes of focused reading to attain. Clearly anecdotal, but you might give it a shot to see how you like it.
Ghostreader & MCP
Another feature touched on above but deserving its own section is Ghostreader. Ghostreader is Reader’s integrated AI reading assistant. You can use it while reading to chat with the current document or you can use it to query your whole library. The possibilities here are endless, but the primary use case is getting quick answers grounded in your own documents. Beyond that, you can use it to synthesize concepts across sources, make reading recommendations, organize your library as an agent, and more.
AI can be rather polarizing, so let us be upfront about two things. First, we strive to tastefully incorporate AI-enabled features where we believe they can deepen the reading experience rather than substitute for it. Second, we make it easy to disable all the AI features if it’s simply not your thing.
If AI is so your thing that you’re familiar with what an MCP server is, you can connect your Reader account to your tool of choice (ChatGPT, Claude, OpenClaw, etc), giving your agent the ability to effortlessly access the full-text of your entire library.
Library versus Feed
As you start saving more and more documents to Reader, you'll notice there are two broad "sections" for organizing your documents: the Library and the Feed. You might then wonder, why two sections? Why not just one?
Think of the Library section as your permanent archive. A place of high signal and low noise. Library is where documents that you manually saved reside.
The Feed section, on the other hand, is transitory. It’s where documents that are automatically pushed to you by others, such as RSS subscriptions and email newsletters, are initially placed. When something in your Feed is worth saving, you can consciously move it to your Library for safekeeping.
Thank you 🙏
There's much more to Reader than we touched on here, but we'll leave it to you to discover those features on your own. Instead, we thank you for making it through this entire guide and not being that guy.
In parting, let us also share that we’re a small team of mission-driven builders who are passionate about reading software. If you have a question, comment, or suggestion, we've built a handy in-app feedback feature that we respond to personally.
You can try it now by opening the Command Palette (Cmd/Ctrl + K), starting to type "feedback", selecting the category that seems right, and saying something like “hello!”
Or perhaps you have real feedback such as below:
You'll probably hear from someone on our team shortly.
Happy reading! 🤓
P.S. Don’t forget to install the browser extension on your computer, the iOS or Android app on your mobile device, and start saving!