Shortform for long books

I’ve been using Blinkist for some book summaries for a few years now, and it’s great! However, I’m noticing a growing problem in the gap between long books and Blinkist, in that the “Blinks” just aren’t long enough to really share the heart of the book.

Blinkist and most related platforms are proud of the fact that they give you “15 minute summaries”. Those are a fantastic way to get an overview of a book, but then they leave a bit gap between that 15 minute summary and the full ~10 hours of reading.

Algorithms to Live By

A great example is the book Algorithms to Live By. I was listening to an episode of the “Who has time to read?” podcast, and this book came up. I don’t remember the exact wording, but their thought was “it’s a great book, but could have been 25% the length“. If you listen to that book on Audible, it’s just shy of 12 hours long.

Enter Shortform. It’s similar to Blinkist, but they give much more in-depth summaries. In the case of Algorithms to Live By, the summary was perhaps 60-90 minutes; far more detailed than Blinkist, but it saved me over 10 hours of reading time from the unnecessarily long book. This certainly has left me with a few blind spots that would have been covered in reading the full book, but the dense 60-90 minutes covered a lot of ground.

There are three other things that I like about Shortform when compared to Blinkist:

• The summaries include links. They’re not afraid to link out to studies they cite or other articles. That alone has given me more content to store in Readwise Reader when I have a chance.
• They cite other books. They often will share ideas and contradictions from other books (“This point from the authors is contradicted in this other book, where they say x“). They clearly have put in a lot of work to find those connections.
• They integrate highlights with Readwise. Blinkist allows highlights, but they’re fairly rudimentary. With Shortform, my highlights sync across devices and I even have them automatically feeding into my Readwise Daily Review.

There’s still one shortcoming, but it may be an unavoidable copyright issue; I wish they’d include more actual quotes from the book inside the summary. The way they summarize the ideas is very well done, but a bit of “And the authors said this quote…” would be great. I suspect that copyright laws likely make that impossible.

All told, I encourage you to give it a shot. I still may use Blinkist for quick reviews, but so far Shortform is looking like an excellent way to digest those huge books that just aren’t worth the hours to get through.