Blinkist Review Tl;dr
Blinkist summarizes 3000+ books that you can read or listen to in under 15 minutes starting at $6.67/€6.67 per month. Great if you’re on a time or money budget or you have ADHD, not so great if you’re into health/nutrition.
What is Blinkist?
The team at Blinkist say that they offer:
Key takeaways from the world’s best nonfiction books in text and audio
Blinkist.com
What does that mean exactly?
You might have heard of “executive summaries” before. They summarize a longer report or proposal in such a way that readers can rapidly become acquainted with a large body of material without having to read it all. They were intended for busy business people.
Now that we’re all super busy and don’t have time for reading books anymore, there’s Blinkist to help out.
Blinkist app (and website) summarizes nonfiction books for all of us to read or listen to. These summaries or blinks, how they call them, are under 15 minutes long, and often under 10 or even 5 minutes.
There are over 3000 titles and counting. From leadership, religion, psychology to sex and marriage, parenting, personal development and so on.
All of these summaries have an audio version with a male or a female voice and different accents. You can’t choose your preference but they all sound good anyway. You can speed them up if that’s your thing.
Pros
Cuts the fluff
No unnecessary information you have to read. A real timesaver.
Great audio
Professional narrators and producers make for a fantastic audio experience.
Learn more, faster
There are many, many books I’d like to read. My reading list is literally two pages long. You might say, why don’t you listen to audiobooks? The problem is, I am also an avid podcast listener! And it truly is a golden age for podcasts and It will only get better. I am thankful that most of the podcasts that I’m a fan of have short clips as well! There’s an idea. App for podcast clips!
Daily pick feature
Each day you’ll get a notification with a random recommended book. You can access it for free here even if you don’t have an account. I love this option as it broadens my views and I make sure to read it every day even if it’s a topic I’m not even remotely interested in. If you have a bookworm at work, get him on the daily pick train and you’ll have a new and exciting topic to discuss every day.
Moneysaver
Blinkist saves you money if you want to consume more than one book per month and helps you weed out books so you don’t spend money on bad ones, or uninteresting ones.
Cons
Some summaries are too short
If you’re only going to relly on the Blinkist app, then some of their blinks might be a bit too short. If I find myself wanting more after reading a blink, I simply buy the book on Amazon straight from the app and read the whole thing.
No ratings or review system
This is the biggest con for me. A simple rating system would be greatly appreciated.
No stories or humor in blinks
Well, if you cut out the “fluff” to get to the meaty parts, I guess there’s no room for storytelling or humor although I’ve seen attempts.
Price
As you can see above, you can try Blinkist for free for 7 days and after that, it’s 12.99$/€ if you’re paying monthly or 6.76$/€ for an annual plan that is 79.99$/€. I always like to pay a lump sum upfront as that’s how you get the most savings. In this case, it’s almost 50%! Seven days should be enough for you to decide if you like the app or not. You can hardly get even a second-hand book for $6.67.
Click on the link and decide for yourself. If you do get a premium plan in the next few days I will get a small commission and I thank you for that.
Conclusion
I’ll tell you why I decided to use Blinkist and ultimately feature it on my blog’s resources page and you decide for yourself.
As you can read in my post 7 Highly Effective Ways I Broaden My Horizons, one of the reasons I’ve started this blog is that I was learning to set up goals for myself. One of the goals was to read at least a book a week.
I LOVE browsing for new books to read and to buy them. My shelf is full of brand new books that are (and probably will stay) unread. I could list an extensive list of excuses that frankly, we all have.
My schedule permits me to basically only read or listen to one book per week, tops. While that is 54 books per year (an avid figure for 90% of the people) my thirst for learning new skills and insights finds this figure meh.
Enter Blinkist. Less than 15 minutes per book is ideal. For books that I find particularly interesting and would want to read more off, I simply buy directly from the app on Amazon and include it into my next week’s full read. If Blinkist gets a commission for that from Amazon, more power to them.
Blinkist is not an app that is going to kill reading full books. Modern life and a backlog of unread books make it a necessity. Most people don’t have the time or frankly need to read many 300+ page books.
I hope this Blinkist review encouraged you to at least try the app and decide for yourself.
Click on the link and decide for yourself. If you do get a premium plan in the next few days I will get a small commission and I thank you for that.
Blinkist Review – FAQ
Yes, it does. You can download text and audio from the Blinkist app.
Unfortunately at this time, there’s no option to share the Blinkist app with your family.
You can still use your Blinkist subscription on as many devices as you like by downloading the app and logging in with your account details. The library, along with your highlights and reading history will be synchronized across the platforms.
You can try Blinkist for free for 7 days and after that, it’s 12.99$/€ if you’re paying monthly or 6.76$/€ for an annual plan that is 79.99$/€.
Yes, you can send your blinks to Kindle!
Blinkist free trial is 7 days long. More than enough to decide if you want the app in your life.
Books-in-blinks distill the main ideas and most important concepts from nonfiction books, but they are new, original works of their own, written in Blinkist style, voice, and scientific format. No avid reader who currently buys books will stop once they discover Blinkist.
Blinkist website says that: “We use real writers to craft real summaries” and that “neither people nor summaries are infallible”.
Anything that has a basis in fact can be called nonfiction. That means reportage, textbooks, manuals, self-help, memoir, history, guidebooks, and so on.
English and German for now.
Here’s what Blinkist says: “We’re here to spark curiosity and help people access the knowledge in non-fiction books more easily – not to water things down.”
On average book-in-blinks can be read in less than 15 minutes. Listening to a book in blinks takes a bit more time, but for those of you who want to learn faster, you can speed up the reads to 1.50X.
There are currently 3.000+ titles available on Blinkist (85% of them as audio versions, too) with more than 30 new titles added every month.
You can easily browse through the categories and navigate to a list of all books in each one.
Click on the link and decide for yourself. If you do get a premium plan in the next few days I will get a small commission and I thank you for that. Besides, you can read random daily picks for free every day!
