Have you ever found yourself wanting but struggling to finish a nonfiction book? Do you want to learn more from professionals about business, entrepreneurship, lifestyle, productivity and much more, but don’t have the time? If you’ve answered yes to those questions, then Blinkist can help you. Stick with this Blinkist review as it will explain the features, pros and cons and everything there is to know about this app.

Blinkist Review- What is Blinkist?

In a nutshell, Blinkist is a professional book summary service that allows you to understand the key insights from the world’s best non-fiction books in 15 minutes or less.

You might be thinking, why would you pay to read only a summary of the book? Well, Blinkist provides more than your standard Amazon product description. They have a dedicated team that reads books and summarises key insights

These summaries allow you to skip all the unnecessary information in a book, but still gain the knowledge and insight from it. This means you can learn about more and different topics faster. Think about when you read a full book: you’ll likely only learn a few key and important insights and make maybe a few pages of notes, but you would have read over 200 pages and spent a lot of time on that. Blinkist’s book summaries are easy-to-digest, centred around the facts, so you can learn more in less time.

Free version vs Paid version

The app is free to download and once you set up an account, you will be able to read one summary each day, which is known as their ‘daily pick’. Unfortunately, this is randomly chosen, so you cannot control what you’re reading. 

If you want full access to their library then you’ll need to pay for their premium account. Blinkist Premium not only ensures unlimited access to every single one of their 4,000+ titles, but there are also exclusive features that come with the subscription. 

Blinkist Premium features

1. An audio version for most of their summaries, for when you don’t have time to read even a short 15-minute summary, you can still just listen on your commute, whilst exercising, cooking or doing chores. A perfect feature for multitasking. 
2. Saving your library offline, so you don’t need to be connected to the internet to access your library and favourite books. 
3. Syncing highlights to Evernote, which makes them searchable. You can also copy and paste them anywhere. 
4. Sending favourite summaries to your Kindle means your summaries are saved forever, and you can bring them anywhere on your Kindle. This will also be available offline. 

Blinkist Pros

It’s easy to navigate the app

There are only three tabs for you to choose from in the app: ‘Discover’ (where you can find new titles by browsing through their library of summaries), ‘Library’ (where you can save titles to your collection), and ‘You’ (where you can find the settings and saved highlights). 

Find new books

The ‘Discover’ tab allows you to explore their library of over 4000 summaries. If you have a specific book or topic you’re looking for, then you can search for the title, author or keyword.

However, you can also just browse through Blinkist’s 27 categories or look through the multiple curated book lists from experts and authors until you find a title that interests you. 

You also have the option of checking the ‘Trending blinks’ to see what’s popular with other Blinkist users or looking at the ‘new’ section to see the most recently added titles

If you’re feeling lazy, or are not quite sure what you’re looking for, don’t fret because the app generates personalised reading recommendations for you.

Minimalist Library setup 

The library tab is straightforward and easy-to-use as you can see straight away which titles you’ve recently added or have started reading, and which titles you’ve finished. 

The preview for each book includes the image, the title, author and the time it takes to read that particular summary—or ‘blink’ as they call it. All the information you need is readily available at a glance, this simple setup is just another way that Blinkist saves you time. 

The clean, distraction-free reading interface

The interface is designed to give you the best reading experience possible, which means it’s really easy to navigate. Once you tap on the book you want to read inside your library, you’ll see a brief overview with the option to either read it or listen to it. If you choose “Read,” you can then swipe from one key highlight to the next.

There is a progress bar at the bottom so you can see how much you’ve read. In between the highlights, you’ll sometimes see additional nuggets of information from the book, and the final blink is always a summary with some actionable advice.

This is all there is to it. This simple setup makes for a nice clean interface that is free of distractions. This is great for those who find it difficult to focus whilst reading. 

Ability to highlight and share

At any time whilst reading, you can highlight any part of the text that speaks to you. Highlighting helps you remember facts from summaries because it allows your brain to subconsciously filter the information you’ll remember, making it an underrated feature.  You can see your saved highlights in your ‘You’ tab. 

Blinkist Cons

You miss out the heart and humour of the book

A summary is still just a summary. They focus on the facts in the book, but this means that they don’t bother including the humour and the fun aspects of the book which makes it good to read.

There may even be some spontaneous insights and ideas from great books that the summary writer missed because they have to choose only the most important points. It’s impossible to transfer all of their knowledge into a summary. Some books are just better read in full.

Summaries lack context

Some points and insights make more sense in context. A summary can also lead to some dangerous misinterpretation of key ideas. A summary may state an idea one way, whereas the context of the book sets it up another way. The context is often crucial in getting the correct impression the author intended readers to have.

You’re putting too much trust into the summary writer

The author likely spent months, even years writing their book, and even after that their manuscript would have gone through the editing and publication process to become its best possible version. 

If the summary writer does a bad job, then all this work would have been for nothing. The summary writer may not have included a story or insight that the author considers crucial to their book. You are not trusting the author of the book, but who wrote the summary. 

Conclusion 

If you have reading goals that you are struggling to reach or are just simply thirsty for more knowledge, then Blinkist allows you the chance to achieve both.  With the clean interface, user-friendly set-up and advanced features, Blinkist offers a brilliant alternative reading experience.

I hope this Blinkist Review has helped you understand what Blinkist is, how it works and whether it is a must-have app for you. If you’re still on the fence, then you can sign up for a free, no-risk, 7-day trial and see how you like the app. If you ultimately decide it’s not for you, then you can cancel at no charge.