Integrating Readwise Reader into My Knowledge Management System
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Introduction
Readwise’s Reader application is a read-it-later and digital note taking tool that integrates seamlessly with your Readwise account. Every highlight you make in Reader instantly syncs with Readwise and then from Readwise to your note-taking app of choice (Notion in my case. I’ll talk more about that later). With the amount of information we’re exposed to daily it's essential to have a tool that helps us easily capture resources from a variety of mediums. Reader certainly ticks that box. While still technically in a public beta, Reader boasts a host of features that rival established read-it-later apps. In this article, we'll explore those features and help you decide if Reader is the right tool to integrate with your own knowledge management system.
You can try Readwise Reader now with a 60 day free trial.
Why Use a Read-It-Later App?
If you’re new to this space you might be wondering why you want to use a read-it-later app in the first place. First and foremost a read-it-later app serves as an excellent capture tool. Quickly capturing a resource while you work, knowing it’s saved for you to consume later means you don’t need to constantly switch context and you can focus on the task at hand.
Separating the capturing and organizing of ideas helps you stay present, notice what resonates, and leave the decision of what to do with them to a separate time - Tiago Forte, Building a Second Brain
Secondly most read-it-later apps act as an excellent curation tool. By saving individual resources or subscribing to the feeds you choose you can create your own personal knowledge repository, bypassing the algorithms, ads and noise of the Internet.
Using a read-it-later app helps you move from passive consumption of content to creating your own. In Building a Second Brain, Tiago breaks this concept down in his C.O.D.E framework (Capture, Organise, Distil & Express). The end goal being to express the knowledge you’ve taken the time to capture and consume to improve your own work. A read-it-later app is a key tool in your knowledge management system for transforming what you read into impactful work.
Features and Functionality
Reader offers all of the features you would expect to find in a read-it-later app as well as a couple that you might now expect. Let's explore some of the key ones:
Unified Repository
You can save documents of all kinds, including web articles, RSS feeds, email newsletters, PDFs, EPUBs, Twitter threads and YouTube videos. Reader could be your one true knowledge archive, if you would like it to be. Personally, I use Reader to capture newsletters and YouTube videos only. Other sources are saved directly into my Notion library database (with the Save to Notion Chrome extension). I explain that further in Where Reader Fits in My Knowledge Management System.
Browser Extension & Web Highlighting
With Reader’s browser extension installed, once you come across an article you want to read, tap the yellow extension icon to save it to Reader. While I generally prefer to make highlights in the Readwise app you can easily make a quick highlight on the webpage itself with the extension installed. You can choose to read articles in their original format, complete with their unique styles and visuals or switch to a clean reading experience within the app itself.
Ghostreader
A nice to have feature for me is Ghostreader, an AI-powered reading assistant based on GPT-3. Ghostreader allows you to define terms, look up encyclopedia entries, simplify complex language, and much more. You can also create document summaries but its most powerful function is asking a document a question. Finding the information you’re looking for with a quick prompt instead of scrolling through a 100 page PDF can be pretty powerful. It’s not something I use regularly but it’s answers have been accurate the couple of times I’ve needed it.
Highlighting YouTube Videos
Spending a couple of hours on the sofa, watching YouTube videos just became a little more productive. It might be an odd thing to say about an app called Reader but the ability to easily save highlights from a video transcript is my primary use case for Reader. I watch a lot of YouTube in my downtime and even though I might be watching a lot of informational content, I’ve always done it relatively passively. Watching the video in Reader itself and making highlights in the transcript as I go has been a game changer for me. The transcript is pulled from the YouTube video as opposed to being generated in Reader itself. It doesn’t show timestamps like it would on YouTube. This isn’t a big problem as the transcript auto-scrolls as you watch but having a timestamp save to your highlight would be a nice touch.
Tip: If you didn’t know you can access the transcript of a YouTube video. Next, click the three-dot menu icon underneath the title of the video. Select “Show Transcript” from the menu. The transcript box will open and you'll see the captions listed along with timestamps.
Saving Twitter Threads
Trying to capture Twitter threads with other extensions or applications can feel a bit clunky. Reader does this really well. You can save Twitter threads to Reader and they'll compile into a single document. To save a Twitter thread in Reader, you must ensure that your Twitter account is connected to Reader through the Import page. You can either publicly reply to a Twitter thread with "@readwise save thread" or privately DM the thread to @readwise with the body text "t" or "thread" once you're connected.
Saving Newsletters
Reader gives you a unique email address that you can use to subscribe to email newsletters. This is a great way to keep your own inbox clean and capture newsletters with the rest of your resources. The double opt-in email you usually get to confirm your newsletter subscription gets sent to your Reader inbox and from then on you’ll receive all of those emails directly in Reader. The one feature I would like to see here is the option to easily see and manage all of the newsletters I’m subscribed to in one place within Reader. While this isn’t in place currently, it looks like there are plans to introduce something similar on their product roadmap.
User Interface
The overall user interface is relatively intuitive after spending a little bit of time in the app. Depending on how you interact with Reader the sections you’ll most likely find yourself in most often are the Library and Feed sections. The Library is where things that you manually curate for yourself and choose to save permanently go. Feed is where things that are automatically pushed to you (RSS subscriptions & newsletters) go. You can move resources you want to read later from your Feed to your Library. By default, your library has Inbox, Read-Later & Archive views to easily triage your saved content.
Reader offers a very different experience on desktop versus mobile. Reader is fully keyboard shortcut driven including while reading documents. Like you would expect from any keyboard shortcuts, once you have the hang of them they can really improve your workflow and the overall experience feels very seamless. However over 95% of the time I’m using Reader it’s via their Android app on my mobile. The pitfall here is that the text selection used to save content to highlights can be very awkward. It’s not awkward to the point that it’s unusable, but awkward enough that it’s referenced in their FAQ documentation. They mention this being an issue with iOS's built-in text selecting module, though I have a very similar experience on Android. Hopefully a built-in text selection tool which they say is on their roadmap will improve this.
One positive I’ve found while using Reader on mobile is the text-to-speech feature, which lets you listen to your resources on the go. While the voice can feel a little robotic at times, it's a convenient way to make the most of your time and stay up-to-date with your reading list.
Integrations
Being built by the Readwise team, the long-term vision is to create an even more unified experience between Readwise and Reader. Even in beta, you can expect a smooth integration that surpasses most established read-it-later apps as Reader and Readwise are built using the same database. There are also pretty solid importing integrations with Instapaper and Pocket as well as Twitter which we touched previously. The integrations for where you can export your data is where things get more interesting. As I mentioned, all my highlights are exported to my Notion workspace but you can export to other popular knowledge management apps like Roam or Obsidian for example.
Where Reader Fits in My Knowledge Management System
Reader highlights are exported to a database in your Notion workspace that’s created when you first export. There’s no way to change what database your highlights are exported to so I couldn’t set it up to export to my preexisting Notion Library database. This isn’t a deal-breaker by any means. If you’re just starting out with Notion, you could build out your Library database around the one Reader automatically exports to. Or, if you’ve already built out a system in Notion it is pretty easy to move content between databases.
Since Reader has a lot of the functionality to manage all of your saved resources, notes and highlights you might be wondering why you would export to another app in the first place. The main reason is that Notion is where I do my work, managing blog content and other projects. Referring back to Tiago Forte’s C.O.D.E framework, Notion is where the Expression takes place, creating and building upon my own work based on the resources I’ve learned from. The reason I pull the data into Notion is so that I can build relations from my resources to my current projects or blog content and refer back to them at any time without needing switch apps or endlessly digging in an archive. With Notion relations I can constantly resurface relevant materials based on the work I’m doing. It means I never start a new project from scratch. There’s a fountain of work and research I’ve already done that’s just waiting to be tapped in to.
If Notion if your primary knowledge repository why use Reader at all? I use Reader for 2 very specific purposes to capture highlights from YouTube videos and newsletters. My book highlights are also exported directly from Readwise via my Kindle app. Everything else (articles, social media posts etc.) get saved directly in Notion. The Reader export, exports all of the highlights for an article but not the article itself. This doesn’t allow me to view a highlight within it’s original context easily. I compromise on this for YouTube videos because I haven’t found a very straight forward way to pull video transcripts into Notion. As for newsletters, the fact that they skip my inbox and go directly into Reader far outweighs being able to view highlights within their full context for me.
If you’re interested in how this system works you can find more information on my Notion Knowledge Management Kit here.
Pricing
The Reader app is available as part of your Readwise subscription. A Readwise subscription comes in at $95.88 annually (which breaks down to $7.99 per month) or $8.99 per month if you opt to pay monthly. It’s a steep price, so it’s up to you if it’s worth paying for. For me, the biggest friction point was that I primarily read fiction books so it was hard to justify a paid Readwise subscription to export those highlights. The functionality of the Reader app was enough for me to take the plunge.
If you’re still on the fence there’s a couple of things worth keeping in mind. Readwise offers a free trial so you can try it out and see if it works for you. There’s also a Lite plan for around half the price but that doesn’t get you access to the Reader app or the option to export your highlights so it’s not worth it, in my opinion.
It’s also worth remembering that Reader is still in a public beta. Readwise have confirmed they intend to increase the price for Readwise/Reader for new subscribers once it exits beta. If you subscribe while Reader is in beta, you'll get lifetime access at the current plan rates.
Conclusion
Reader is a powerful read-it-later app, with a lot of interesting features and an exciting roadmap. Personally, it will never become the primary repository in my knowledge management system as there’s no way for me to take action on what I’m consuming. That said, it’s an integral part of my system and plugs a number of important gaps. A steeper subscription price might put you off but if you’re undecided a 30 day free trial is definitely worth trying out. Or, you can get a 60 day free trial from my invite link here.