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This will be a briefer than usual update on the Readwise Reader public beta
as most of what we've been doing over the past four weeks has been smashing bugs, honing onboarding & upgrading flows, fixing random UX
glitches, and improving the performance of the app. That said, we have shipped some new features worth sharing such as document-level Ghostreader on mobile, document note export to
note-taking apps, customizable keyboard shortcuts, and more.
As a reminder, I write this newsletter approximately every two to four weeks 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 Reader, you can subscribe to the private RSS feed here.
Before getting into those product updates, I'm going to pull our roadmap discussion forward since
many folks are nearing the end of their free trials and are asking where Reader is going in the short-term.
Below is a non-exhaustive list of major priorities over the next few months:
- Performance Refactor –
As of today (February 13th), we just pushed up a significant performance improvement to the iOS and Android apps! They should be noticeably less laggy/sluggish now.
That being said, probably the most urgent item on our to-do list is a series of even more performance refactors that will make Reader 2x+ faster across both
web and mobile. For folks on slow hardware with a lot of data, the speed enhancements will likely be even more dramatic. Tristan and Adam
have spent the past few weeks shaping this project (“If I had an hour to solve a problem I'd spend 55 minutes thinking about the
problem...”) and Adam will begin focusing on execution starting this week.
- Text-to-Speech v2 – Next on
the list is TTS v2. This project is a bevy of one-off upgrades including porting TTS from mobile to the web app, enabling arbitrary starting
& seeking within a document, reenabling TTS on EPUBs, exploring non-English language support, adding playlist functionality, and adding
AirPod highlighting. Artem has already started on TTS v2 and even made a huge breakthrough on a technical hurdle that was
blocking us.
- PDFs v2 – Like TTS v2, the
next phase of PDFs in Reader is a mishmash of smallish upgrades and UX fixes. Little things like next page & previous page buttons, "snapshotting"
capability, embedded highlights for downloading the PDF file, and so on. Artem previously led PDFs, but Mati is probably going to take this project over in the short-term so that we can divide and conquer.
- Pagination – Pagination
refers to reading a document one page at a time rather than continuous scroll. We're not particularly opinionated as to which mode is better,
but we do know that many folks prefer to read longform with pagination because it provides a clearer sense of spatial awareness. This is the kind of
feature that excites us because it gives us an opportunity to push the established boundaries of digital reading. Speaking of which, Jesse is just now finishing up his design and UX so we can prepare pagination for an upcoming dev cycle.
- Highlight Management – Until
recently, we've been deferring most highlight-specific capability to what we've already built with Readwise 1.0. That said, we know there's a
lot of highlight actions that are much more natural alongside the original document in Reader. If you look in the Notebook section of the web
app, you can see we've already started to implement highlight management there and this is just the beginning.
- Search v2 – Right now we
have offline search that operates on the full-text of any document, and we have client-side filtering that operates on the metadata of any
document. From a technical perspective, these features run on completely different architectures, which is why they're currently distinct. But
from a user perspective, they want to be combined into a single search box. Search v2 will unify full-text search and query-based filtering as
well as lower the bar of difficulty on both.
- Ghostreader v2 – Finally,
Ghostreader is our "copilot of reading" spin on GPT-3/LLMs. The generative AI space has been moving so quickly that we've been letting
the dust settle before deciding what direction to go next. That said, it's becoming clearer to us which of our ideas are uniquely possible in
Reader and (hopefully) actually useful rather than mere gimmicks.
I've skipped over the many smallish features we also have in the works such as quoteshots,
iPad/tablet upgrades, and so on, but the projects above are the big things we hope to have done in the next one to three months. We hope you're as
excited as we are 🙂
Now onto the recently shipped product updates!
Document-level Ghostreader on mobile 👻📱
Ghostreader is our implementation of GPT-3 into Reader. As a reminder, you can invoke Ghostreader at
various levels of hierarchy within a document:
- On the word- or phrase-level for prompts like define and encyclopedia
lookup.
- On the paragraph- or highlight-level for prompts like simplify or translate.
- On the section-level for prompts like summarize or tl;dr.
- And on the whole document-level for prompts like summarize and asking
questions.
Until recently, document-level prompts were only available in the web app, but now you can use these
in the mobile app too.
There are a couple different pathways to document-level Ghostreader on mobile.
Props to Artem for picking this up from Simon. There are still a few more
mobile Ghostreader upgrades coming, but this was by far the most sought after.
Document notes to note-taking apps 📝
We added document notes to Reader incrementally. First, we added them to the web app. Then the
mobile apps. Then the share sheets. Then the browser extensions. Finally, we've added document notes to note-taking exports and the Readwise 1.0
public API.
For template-driven exports like Obsidian and Roam Research, you can use the variable document_note
to place the document note how and where you want.
For page-driven exports like Notion and Evernote, the document note should appear as the first
element in the body.
Props to Bruno for continuing to lead on the export front.
App Speed ⚡️
As mentioned above, we just pushed up a big performance improvement to the iOS and Android apps! They should now be noticeably less laggy/sluggish.
You may need to go Settings > scroll bottom > "Load Latest Bug fixes" to get the update. Note: there may be a one time lag (a few seconds) when you first get this update as we reindex your data -- after that, things should be fast.
Of course, even more performance improvements to come!
Customizable keyboard shortcuts ⌨️
🚨 Attention all Europeans, Vim power users, and other opinionated folk:
You can now modify the shortcuts of the web app to suit your
keyboard layout and bespoke preferences.
If you've ever customized shortcuts in a videogame or productivity app like Obsidian, hopefully the
flow here will be natural to you. You find the action with the shortcut you want to change, click the + button
to begin recording, and press the new shortcut. If the pressed keys are already in use, you'll get an error instructing you to first unbind those
keys from their current assignment.
We intend to make this process even easier over time with predefined layouts for common use cases
(eg "North American Vim"), but we decided to begin with the most flexible version of this feature to be as inclusive as possible on day
one.
Special thanks to Chris and Florian for helping us better understand the German and Swiss keyboard
layouts.
Props to Jesse on design and Mati on execution. A
feature like this might look simple, but it covers a lot of surface area.
Profile & Preferences Refactor ⚙️
Part and parcel with smoothing out the onboarding process, we've refactored the various supplemental
pages to the Reader web app to make everything tidier and easier to find (we hope).
In particular, we've added a Preferences page to surface settings previously confined to the Command
Palette to make those more discoverable and refreshed the help menu.
Did you know you can choose whether you want Reader to open to the Home screen or Library by default? Or whether to advance to the next document
or return to the list? Or which side panels you want visible when opening a document?
Props to Jesse on design and Mati on execution again.
Readwise Discord Bot v3 Beta 👾
Last but not least, we've shipped a new version of the Readwise Discord Bot for beta testing and we'd
love your feedback.
The Readwise Discord Bot does many things, but its main innovation is to help you stay on top of
interesting links shared within your public communities. Here's how it works:
- Enables you to react to any message with :bookmark: to DM that message to
yourself (like Bookmarker Bot) or with :floppy-disk: to save that message to your Readwise account as if it were a highlight or tweet.
- Automatically adds shared links to a Hacker News-like link aggregator (here's
an example of the aggregated links from the
Readwise Community Server).
- Automatically generates an RSS feed of shared links with an augmented header
and footer to bring people back to your Discord server (here's the RSS feed for the Readwise Community
Server).
The main update in this version of the bot was to make moderation of which links are accepted and
rejected far simpler. If you're a server admin/moderator, the bot will create two channels (#accepted-links and #rejected-links) which you can check
once a day or so to quickly weed out false positives, false negatives, and set domain-based filtering rules going forward.
If you want to give the bot a whirl in your server, use this link to install. We'd love to know
what you think!
Minor Improvements 🦐
- Completely overhauled the Reader pricing & upgrade flow on both web and
mobile.
- Made document titles clickable on mobile to open the original URL in the
browser.
- Started adding highlight management in the Notebook of the right sidebar in
the web app.
- Added the ability to sort Views, Feeds, and Tags in the mobile app.
- Added a new default View for Videos.
- Shortened the long swipe distance on mobile to be more fluid.
- Improved the auto-scrolling accuracy when clicking or tapping highlights from
the Notebook.
- Improved performance of the Reader backend and database affecting several
interactions such as parsing, site loading, and more.
- Tweaked the sensitivity of the shake-to-undo.
- Improved finding of text inside of a PDF on Android.
- Added support for JSON OPML files.
- Added Atkinson Hyperlegible font to Appearance settings.
- Massively improved the exporting of uploaded files (particularly for users
with a lot of files) to email with a download link.
- Added a warning when exiting the feedback text box on web to not accidentally
lose what was written.
- Significantly improved the speed of exporting highlights from Reader to
note-taking apps (now will almost always be less than 10 minutes).
- Worked with the RemNote folks to add back the export integration using their
plugin system.
Bug Fixes 🐛
- Fixed bug in the mobile app where you'd occasionally get "stuck" in
a content frame unable to scroll.
- Fixed bug with PDFs where watermark would erroneously show.
- Fixed bug with a blank screen initially loading on the web app for good.
- Fixed parsing issue with medium.com documents.
- Fixed parsing issue with patreon.com documents.
- Fixed parsing issue with atlantic.com documents when
saved via iOS.
- Fixed various RSS feeds including Marginal Revolution, Pinboard feeds, Seattle
Times, others.
- Fixed bug where sorting wouldn’t work on unsaved filtered views.
- Fixed bug where the web app would crash if you opened the Command Palette on
the import page.
- Fixed bug where newly saved RSS documents sometimes wouldn’t show after
adding a new feed.
- Fixed bug in the mobile app where the "Paste URL" dialog would show
even if the setting was toggled off.
- Fixed bug where users would lose the built-in "Shortlist" saved
filtered View when switching Library location configuration.
- Fixed major bug where articles & highlights saved via the browser
extension sometimes weren’t saving properly.
- Fixed bug where YouTube playback speed settings would revert to 1x after the
video was paused.
- Fixed bug where typing tags in the browser extension on top of a YouTube video
would trigger the video to start playing.
- Fixed a bunch of bugs with the Daily Digest.
- Fixed bug where Safari extension would shift focus from Google text inputs.
- Fixed bug where content focus indicator height would sometimes be off.
- Fixed bug where
Cmd/Ctrl +
Enter would no longer keep the tag popover open.
- Fixed bug where highlights on PDFs would show only in a dim yellow.
- Fixed bug where PDFs and documents that failed to parse were showing
improperly in the Daily Digest.
- Fixed bug where changing plans from Lite to Full via the mobile app wouldn’t
work if you were subscribed via Apple.
- Fixed bug where Safari extension was broken for users with Safari character
encoding set to Chinese.
- Fixed bug affecting the sort of YouTube video documents by length.
- Fixed bug with EPUB files not uploading properly.
- Fixed bug with setting tags from the iOS/Android share sheets.
- Fixed bug where sometimes Command Palette wouldn’t close after clicking
it.
- Fix bug where push notification would be sent for Daily Digest even if it was
empty.
Creator Content 📼
FromSergio
Sergio’s
latest Reader tutorial is about as comprehensive as it gets. If you’ve yet to explore our YouTube feature, set
up your Feed, or dive into Ghostreader, you’ll benefit from the workflows he shares in this video.
Readwise Official: Setting up your Daily Digest
In our latest official tutorial vid, Erin will show you how
to use Daily Digest and explain why it works. The Daily Digest is a daily habit of staying on top of your Feed, preventing your reading queue
from overflowing, and, most importantly, becoming a consistent reader.
ProgressLeavesClues
ProgressLeavesClues
just shared the most succinct Reader walkthrough to date and still managed to hit all the essentials. Checkout his latest
video to see why Reader is at the heart of his Second Brain.
Rational Reminder Podcast
Last but not least, I was interviewed in the Rational Reminder Podcast a few
weeks ago. We mainly talked about Readwise 1.0. Maybe in a few years I'll get to talk about Reader on podcasts too 😛
Other Resources
For ease of reference in case you missed them during the onboarding process:
As always, if you've had any issues onboarding, please feel free to reach out and we'll do our best
to help you get set up!
Farewell 👋
Now that we've spent the past two months recovering from public beta launch, we're excited to sink
our teeth into some big features again.
Thank you again for your continued support and please reach out any time 🙏
– Dan,
Tristan, & the Readwise team
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