Social Network: Catch up on reading with apps, websites

In this column, I cover interesting ways how you can overcome the challenges and catch up on reading. 

There are excellent book summary websites that do a brilliant job of distilling the ideas from books and present it to you in a concise manner. These are people who have taken the time to read the book in its entirety and then taken the effort to write the main ideas and key points in the book. 

This means you don’t necessarily need to spend weeks to finish reading a book. The book summaries are crisply written and you can finish reading them or listening to them in a few minutes. 

I’m listing down a few of the interesting book summary websites and audio sites. 

This is an app that is available both on Android and iOS app store. They employ people to write excellent summaries of books. It’s present as both text summaries and audio summaries. You can finish listening to a ‘blink’ in less than 15 minutes. They also have a free edition. In the free option, you can read one book summary per day. The paid version costs around Rs.3,000 a year. Once you pay for the app, you can read and listen to unlimited book summaries. This is one of my favourite apps and I often listen to blinks found my early morning walks. 

This website has around 800 book summaries and the best part is that all of them are free. Yes, you read it right. It’s completely free. Just because it is free, don’t assume that the quality is low. The summaries are actually very well-written. Most of the summaries available are those of self-improvement and best-selling business books. 

This site has a good collection of book summaries. You can try out the site for just one dollar and read as many book summaries for seven days. After that, the monthly subscription is USD 29. That’s around Rs.2,000 per month. A bit expensive but then, don’t look at knowledge as an expense. It’s good investment you are making. 

The way this is different from others is that they have a mastermind programme that lets you collaborate with others. It gives a sense of community and useful for people who do well in groups. Remember that the book summaries are not replacements for the original books. Use it as a stepping stone. If you really like a book summary, then you can invest in buying the book and reading it. This method has personally helped me a lot. I hope this has been helpful for you and I wish you get on the book reading and book listening bandwagon. Happy reading everyone.