Hey all,

I'm excited to finally hit send on public beta newsletter #6 with our latest Readwise Reader updates 🙂

As a reminder, I write this newsletter every one to two months (usually) covering features we've just shipped, bugs we've recently fixed, and what we intend to work on next. I also share tips & tricks to help you get the most out of Reader. If you prefer to read these in-app, you can subscribe to the private RSS feed linked here.

It's been a long time – (four months, to be exact) – since we've sent one of these updates. In contrast, we previously averaged one update email every 3.5 weeks across both private & public beta. So why the wait here?

Well, after hitting send on the last newsletter, we resolved to not send another until we'd shipped Reader's long-awaited performance refactor. Refactors are terrible, risky projects, and we decided to do whatever it'd take – including rotating all our frontend engineers into the effort – to just get it done.

As of today, I'm delighted to report that the performance refactor is officially shipped! Depending on the power of your hardware and the number of documents in your account, you should notice speed increases of 2x to 100x across both the web app and mobile apps. In addition, countless complex bugs (like those encountered when multiple browser tabs were open), memory leaks, and edge cases should now be fixed.

We're so glad that's behind us. Now we can resume building cool new features at our usual pace. Speaking of which, we already have product updates to share:

• 🚀 Performance Refactor – As mentioned above, your web and mobile app experience should feel roughly 2x to 100x faster. Make sure you're using the newest version by hard refreshing the web app in your browser and downloading the latest mobile app (4.0) from your app store.
• 🗯️ Unreal Speech TTS – Text-to-speech got a huge upgrade with Unreal Speech's significantly more life-like models.
• 🤏 Auto-Summarization – Whenever you manually save a document to Reader, it'll now be automatically summarized by AI (currently GPT-3.5) at no extra cost as part of your subscription.
• 🪃 Summaries Email (beta) – The automatically generated summaries in the bullet above also flow into a new, beautifully laid out email helping you read what you wanted to read, filter out the rest, and more.
• 💻 Native Mac App – Last but not least, you can now install Reader as a native app on your Mac for fewer distractions and even more speed. Before you ask: yes, Windows will be coming shortly; and no, it's not an Electron wrapper.

Performance Refactor 🚀

We like to think of our users as the heroes each on an epic journey with our software as some kind of magical weapon to aid in those adventures. We're not the ones on a quest; you are. And our role is merely to help. Accordingly, we try hard to avoid what Steven Pinker calls professional narcissism in these updates.

With that in mind, here's all I'll say about this performance refactor:

Building a cross-platform app that only works online is easy. Building an offline-first app that only works when locally-installed is easy. Building an offline-first, cross-platform app that only works when locally-installed is medium. Building an offline-first, cross-platform app that works in a web browser without any local installation is hard.

We built Reader to meet the requirements of the last sentence and our initial approach worked fine – that is, until we scaled the app to users with weak hardware and/or lots of documents. Under these conditions, the user experience could get annoyingly slow. To fix this, we had to rewrite the entire architecture of the app. This included over 36,000 modified lines of code, 520 edited files, 300 pull requests, 7 contributors, and a one-way trip to the forefront of client-side databases.

If some of you are actually interested in the technical details, let me know and I'll try to persuade Adam, Hannes, and/or Tristan to write a blog post.

In any case, refactors like these are risky because they don't always pay off, but fortunately this project delivered the performance we thought it would. We've since put the refactored app through ~2 months of internal and external QA and we think we've caught everything. That said, if you notice anything off, like a complex filtered view no longer returning the same list of documents, let us know by reporting a bug in-app and we'll promptly get it fixed.

My favorite part byproduct of this refactor – as a user? I can now use Reader on my commodity Android e-ink tablet to read in bed and on the beach.

This is not an endorsement but for those wondering, this is a Boox Tab Mini C which has an E Ink Kaleido screen

Although this refactor was a team effort with credit owed to each of Artem, Mitch, Mati, and Tristan, special kudos goes to Adam for valiantly shouldering the burden of this project and to Hannes for overcoming some insane technical challenges during the final stretch.

Unreal Speech TTS 🗯️

When we initially added text-to-speech to Reader, the "neural nets" of Microsoft Azure, AWS Polly, and Google Cloud were state-of-the-art in web scale speech synthesis. Oh how far AI has come since then. Now the best text-to-speech models are nearly indistinguishable from human narrators and they're only getting better.

Speaking of which, we just upgraded the text-to-speech in Reader to use one such next-generation model made by our friends at Unreal Speech. I think you'll agree the voices are significantly better than before.

Here's a quick Loom recording I made demonstrating the two voices side-by-side.

But wait, there's more: As part of this upgrade, we fixed the pitch of the voices when listening at slower and faster than 1.0x speeds, and we've restored text-to-speech functionality on long documents on Android.

A couple notes: Unlike Microsoft Azure, the makers of Unreal Speech are constantly responding to our feature requests. For example, if you note a weird pronunciation here or there or mistimed word boundaries, those should be steadily improving over time. Also, the Unreal model only works on English documents right now. For non-English documents, you can continue using Azure.

Props to Artem for leading this switch and discovering the technologies to enable better sounding speeds and long-form Android TTS.

Auto-Summarization 🤏

Over the summer, we shipped a summarization feature which enabled you to manually summarize any document by clicking the Ghostreader icon in the metadata panel or to automatically summarize all new documents by adding your OpenAI token. Now you don't need to do either. All your manually saved documents will be automatically summarized for you as part of your subscription.

Please note that auto-summarization doesn't apply to your Feed, but you can still use your OpenAI token to automatically summarize those if you wish.

Props to Hannes for building this and Tadek for getting it across the finish line.

Summaries Email (Beta) 🪃

If you've saved a document to Reader in the past few days, you might have already received your first Summaries Email (working title). The Summaries Email digests newly added documents into a beautifully laid out newsletter reminding you of what you saved over the past 24 hours.

If you haven't received a Summaries Email already, try saving two documents real quick and wait until tomorrow morning.

That's what this feature is. But why?

A few reasons:

First, it's a common complaint that we save things to our read-it-later app only to never find the time to actually read them later. With this workflow, now even if you never get around to reading the whole article, at least you'll have gotten the gist. In other words, you'll somewhat read everything you hoped to.

Second, not everything we save is actually worth reading in full, at least when considering how finite our time for reading actually is. But hope springs eternal, causing our reading queues to overflow with more documents than we'll ever actually get to. We've found that after reading the summary, letting go of "mid" documents becomes much easier. In other words, you'll filter out noise enabling you to focus on what's more important.

Finally, it's just nice to batch everything you saved the prior day into a ritual or routine. Rather than go down various rabbit holes throughout the day, you can save interesting links for later knowing you'll see them again tomorrow.

We'll be improving this feature incrementally over the next few months including, likely, developing an in-app alternative. Until then, if you don't like email-based features, you can disable these Summaries Emails on the new Product Emails page. You can also manage this product update email and as well as Wisereads from the same preferences page.

Props again to Hannes for developing this feature, Jesse for his email templating, and Tadek for getting it across the finish line.

Native Mac App 💻

Like I said above, building an offline-first, cross-platform app that only works when locally-installed is relatively easy compared to what we did. If it's so easy, prove it, am I right?

Sure, Mitch made a native Mac app over last weekend, and he'll follow up with a Windows version soon.

Download the Mac version here: readwise.io/read/download

The native app is completely optional, but it's main benefits right now are (1) it's nice to read outside the distraction-laden browser and (2) it's even faster than the newly accelerated web app. Also, if your browser is causing issues with the web app for some random reason, you can always use this native app instead.

Mitch's "Not an Electron wrapper" T-shirt has a lot of people asking questions already answered by his shirt. That said, inquiring minds want to know: if not Electron, then what is it? It's Tauri, which is Rust, which means it's badass and, more importantly, it doesn't bundle up Chromium!

Props to Mitch for spinning this up.

Coming Up 🔜

• Pagination – We were sooo close to shipping pagination on mobile last update. Then we needed to rotate Artem into the performance refactor instead. Now that that project is shipped, he'll pick up where he left off here.
• Readwise 1.0 – Last update, we had just gotten the ball rolling on recreating Readwise 1.0 functionality inside of Reader. Just like pagination, however, we needed to rotate Mitch off this project and into the performance refactor. Now that that's over, he'll pick up where we left off.
• Folders – While you can currently organize feeds and documents into groups using filtered views, this abstraction is one level too low for most folks. Especially old school RSS feed readers. We've massaged the information architecture to accommodate folder-based organization without introducing more complexity to the user interface that we're about to start building.
• Summaries Email Upgrades – As mentioned above, the Summaries Email is still quite basic. We have several enhancements in the works.

Minor Improvements 🦐

• Hannes, Jesse, and I started sending a weekly newsletter called Wisereads featuring the most highlighted content in Readwise over the past week alongside curated ebooks (with writing assistance from Abi and Cayla).
• Although a constant work in progress, Tadek shipped several parsing improvements to forwarded emails to make them render better in Reader better.
• As his first shipped feature, Rasul added the ability to forcefully unsubscribe from email senders in the web app.
• Tristan improved the Gmail autoforwarding flow to better handle the automated authentication emails.
• Bruno added a new endpoint to the Readwise 1.0 public API for fetching a user's Daily Review highlights. Now we just need someone to make a sick GPT using this.
• Bruno added Google Docs as a new export target for your highlights setting us up to work with our friend Steven Johnson on his Google Gemini-powered writing tool NotebookLM.
• Mati added PDF snapshotting to the mobile apps.
• Mati added settings on both web and mobile to disable PDF color inversion in dark mode.
• Bruno improved the Twitter integration to handle formatting such as bold & italics.
• Bruno added published_date as a variable to export templates such as Obsidian.

Bug Fixes 🐛

• Fixed massive Android crashing issue caused by our error monitoring SDK (Sentry)
• Fixed bug where the top status bar would incorrectly appear in reading view
• Fixed bug with creating filtered views of a single feed subscription
• Fixed bug with adding PDFs to the mobile apps
• Fixed bug with subscribing to RSS feeds in the mobile apps
• Fixed bug with saving invalid URLs to the mobile apps
• Fixed bug with some highlights not syncing from Reader to Readwise
• Fixed bug with missing book covers in Readwise 1.0 exports
• Fixed bug with the Android bottom sheet closing too easily
• Fixed bug with the mobile Table of Contents subheadings not opening correctly
• Fixed bug with Print With Annotations feature for YouTube videos
• Fixed bug with PDF snapshot highlights not syncing to Notion properly
• Fixed bug with PDF reading positions not being properly saved
• Fixed bug with PDFs not rotating properly
• Fixed bug where highlighting a PDF in the mobile apps would cause the PDF to scroll
• Fixed bug with Evernote exporting where updates to a note were not appearing (due to an issue caused by their updated API)
• Fixed regression with the highlight annotation bar on mobile where it wouldn’t hide properly when resuming reading
• Fixed bug with Medium highlights duplicating in Readwise 1.0
• Fixed bug with Pocket import sometimes not bringing in every document
• Fixed bug with EPUBs showing up as Articles in Readwise 1.0
• Fixed bug with Ghostreader Q&A prompt
• Fixed bug with the keyboard sometimes not appearing when editing notes on Android
• Fixed bug with ordering of PDF snapshot highlights in the Notebook
• Fixed bug with saving open.substack.com links
• Fixed bug with undo button sometimes not displaying on Android
• Fixed bug with document tags list losing focus in the web app
• Fixed bug with trying to snapshot a PDF starting on the left side of the mobile screen triggering the Table of Contents to open
• Fixed bug with scrolling gestures on PDFs sometimes selecting text incorrectly
• Fixed bug with EPUBs sometimes setting reading progress to 100% while opening
• Fixed bug with the top bar header not centering the page number on PDFs
• Fixed bug with long tweets not displaying images
• Fixed bug with and date types not working in Tana exports
• Fixed bug with document language picker not saving on Android
• Fixed bug with Daily Digest failing to load for some users
• Fixed issues with Twitter list digests not showing up properly
• Fixed bug with the mobile app share sheet not loading all tags into the list
• Fixed bug with Home screen customization not scrolling on mobile
• Fixed bug with long URLs overflowing off the screen on mobile
• Fixed bug where double tapping to highlight a paragraph wouldn't trigger if the tap occurred too close to left edge
• Fixed bug with YouTube videos not being included in CSV exports
• Fixed bug with PDFs not loading properly on web

Creator Content 📼

Tiago Forte

Tiago Forte, the second brain thought leader responsible for bringing personal knowledge management to the mainstream, shares how he uses Readwise to populate the single most valuable folder in his Evernote account.

Pillars of Productivity

Speaking of Tiago Forte, he and his team launched their new course Pillars of Productivity last month and already welcomed over 2250 people. One such "pillar of productivity" is a read-later app, which means one lesson is completely focused on teaching people how to use Reader as the primary example.

David Senra

Our friend, David Senra, has spent years documenting the wisdom of the world’s greatest entrepreneurs through his Founder’s podcast. If you’re a fan of David's, you might consider checking out David’s Founder's Notes.

Charlie Grinnell

Learn how Charlie Grinnell, digital marketing strategist for brands including Red Bull, Arcteryx. and Artizia, absorbs and organizes all his knowledge with Reader and our Reflect integration.

MoneyXYZ

For our Chinese-speaking community, watch how Ray of MoneyXYZ sets up his Reader workflow and makes use of our social links feature (11:04).

Simon Theakston

In his latest blog post. Simon Theakston shares how he uses Reader across his desktop, iPad, and iPhone. We especially love his “life roles” tagging strategy.

Sergio

Want to take more impactful annotations in 2024? Sergio will teach you how to make smart notes that last a lifetime.

Farewell 👋

In previous updates, we posted roles for a Growth Engineer and a Generalist Startup Writer. We're delighted to welcome Rasul Kireev and Abi Hulick, respectively, to the team! We're also excited to share that Mitch and Fernando are now officially with us full-time.

As mentioned in the intro, that refactor led to the longest we've gone between updates since working on Reader. Now that it's behind us, we're excited to resume shipping at our normal pace!

Thank you again for your continued support and please reach out any time 🙏
– Dan, Tristan, & the Readwise team