Hi {name, "all}, I'm pleased to send out this public beta newsletter #12 describing the latest round of Reader [https://readwise.io/read] updates (as well as a few new fun features for the original Readwise [https://readwise.io])! As a reminder, we send this in-depth newsletter every few months covering features we've just shipped, bugs we've recently fixed, and tips to help you get the most out of Reader (and sometimes Readwise). If you prefer to read these in-app, you can subscribe to the pr
 
Reader Public Beta Update #12 (EPUBs v2, PDF Clean Text v2, Chat Preview, and a lot more)
Daniel Doyon • 19 Jun 2025
 
 

Hi all,

I'm pleased to send out this public beta newsletter #12 describing the latest round of Reader updates (as well as a few new fun features for the original Readwise)!

As a reminder, we send this in-depth newsletter every few months covering features we've just shipped, bugs we've recently fixed, and tips to help you get the most out of Reader (and sometimes Readwise). If you prefer to read these in-app, you can subscribe to the private RSS feed linked here.

It's been a little over 4 months since our last update. Much longer than our typical cadence, candidly. While we've been consistently posting smaller updates to the changelog, one project in particular (EPUBs v2) was much much harder than expected. But the payoff is significant and we think you'll find the ebook experience greatly improved. Thank you for your patience while we wrapped this up!

One PSA before the product updates: In addition to the new functionality described below, we've been quietly cooking on some massive projects behind the scenes. So big that we're hoping to recruit some intrepid users to test some early iterations and provide feedback 🙏

If you'd be interested, sign up using the brief survey link. We'll reach out at some point with opportunities to test, sneak peeks at what we're building, and of course thank you gifts for your time. Sign up as an early tester →

Without further ado, onto the updates:

  • 📚 EPUBs v2 — You can now read ebooks with a dedicated "long-form" user interface, 10x+ faster speed & performance, chapter breaks, and dozens of formatting fixes.
  • 📜 PDF Clean View v2 — Your newly uploaded PDFs now come with a much higher quality rich text version. This enables you to read, highlight, and listen to PDFs as if they were any other reflowable document.
  • 💬 Chat with Document (Web Preview) — You can now chat with documents as you're reading them in the web app using advanced LLMs. This is the first step of upgrading Ghostreader, and we're sharing this preview for early feedback!
  • ✒️ E-Ink Mode — If you use Reader on an Android-based e-ink device, such as a Boox or Daylight, you should find the overall experience to be better optimized including better black on white contrast and reduced animations.
  • ⚡️ Faster Document Opening — In addition to the overall performance boost on EPUBs, you'll now find that documents of any type open significantly faster in the apps.
  • 🎧 Audio Reviews — You can now listen to your Readwise daily reviews on-the-go. This includes high quality voices and natural transitions resulting in a personalized, podcast-like listening experience of the best ideas you've read and want to revisit.
  • 🧠 AI Themed Reviews — You can now much more easily create themed reviews in Readwise to resurface highlights only related to a particular topic or interest. Themed reviews are one of our most loved features in Readwise, but they previously required a lot of effort to setup. No longer, thanks to LLMs!
  • 📤 Craft Export Integration – You can now export your highlights from Readwise to beautifully formatted Crafted pages in your space. The Craft team is also generously offering Readwise users 50% off Craft for life when you sign up at craft.do/readwise (and use code READWISE50 at checkout)!

As always, we've also shipped a bunch of other improvements that don't make the headlines including a Readwise MCP server (for highlights), custom iOS icons, a bevy of API improvements, new AI models for Ghostreader, and more.

📚 EPUBs v2

From a technical perspective, the way EPUBs worked in Reader to date was to treat them as "really long articles". This approach worked, but was far from ideal for several reasons including performance, mismatched user interface, and missing ebook treatments. After a half-year refactor, these have all been addressed. You should now find the EPUB reading experience to be greatly improved, particularly in the iOS and Android apps.

More detail:

Performance. Previously, Reader would load the entire book's content into memory. Now the app smartly loads one chapter at a time leading to an order of magnitude speed up in performance. This sounds straightforward, but it turned out to be one of the hardest technical projects we've ever worked on.

Long-Form User Interface. Because Reader started as a read-it-later app, intended for quickly consuming a queue of short-form content, the user interface was designed with that use case in mind. While triaging is appropriate for articles, it's not so helpful when revisiting a book over multiple sessions. Accordingly, we've redesigned a new reading view for "long-form" documents which is focused, minimal, and follows best practices for ebook apps. This view is automatically enabled on EPUBs in the latest app version (be sure to update), but you can enable or disable it for other document types on the Settings page if you like.

Ebook Treatments. Another byproduct of treating EPUBs as really long articles was the lack of page breaks between chapters. Now new chapters always start on a fresh page. We've also tightened up the vertical margins, so the pages look cleaner, and created a set of header-footer combos you can cycle through.

EPUB Styles. Finally, we've built a massive test suite across hundreds of EPUB files to make sure ebooks are rendered the way the authors designed them. EPUBs are kind of like PDFs in their flexibility and idiosyncrasy, so if you snag a new edge case we haven't encountered yet, please feel free to let us know and we'll add it to our test suite going forward.

Candidly, this project took much much longer than we expected. It was one of those things where the last 10% took as long as the first 90% due to all the edge cases, various platforms and apps (multiple web browsers, iOS, Android, etc), and migration of existing user content.

Regardless, props to Mitch, Artem, and Johannes for teaming up to get this done.

We love books, so we're focused on continuing to elevate the ebook reading experience. If there's anything you think we should improve, we'd love to hear it. By the way, this upgrade pairs nicely with two other features we're announcing today: E-Ink Mode and Chat with Documents.

📜 PDF Clean View v2

Reading a PDF on your phone is painful: pinch-zooming, side-scrolling across double columns, losing your place when you rotate the screen, and so on. For these reasons, there's a feature enabling you to toggle PDFs from a fixed layout into ordinary, reflowable text. This "clean view" has been in Reader for a few years, but admittedly the converted text quality was hit or miss.

Fortunately, the technology for parsing PDFs has significantly advanced since then and this is now incorporated into Reader's parsing pipeline. Newly uploaded PDFs are streamed through an AI engine that unwraps multi-column text, extracts images, and preserves text formatting resulting in a much higher quality text layer.

As of right now, this parsing only applies to newly uploaded PDFs (rather than previously uploaded), but we're working on a per-document command you can use to trigger a reprocessing of an existing PDF.

In addition to the superior text content, the title and author metadata are now extracted using an AI pipeline, so you should now see accurate titles and authors almost all the time instead of, for example, xa2de32 Final Final.pdf.

Props to our intern Scott (with support from our infra guru Hannes) on pulling this off.

💬 Chat with Document (Web Preview)

When ChatGPT was first released in late 2022, there was a lot of skepticism around durability of the "chat" interface. The prevailing wisdom for the next two years was that chat was merely a retrofitting of LLMs into existing interfaces and newer UI/UX paradigms would soon be discovered. Accordingly, we were wary of adding a chat with document feature to Reader and instead chose to explore experimental user-facing applications of AI that could be harnessed while reading (aka Ghostreader) as opposed to before, after, or instead of reading.

As of mid-2025, these predictions of chat's demise seem misguided or, at least, much too early. For better or worse, chat is the interface that consumers have come to expect when using AI and we're now confident it makes sense to upgrade Ghostreader to incorporate it – where appropriate, of course.

In this update specifically, we're sharing a preview of chat with document on web. Mobile and library-wide chat will follow, and somewhere along the way existing Ghostreader (including existing prompts) will be unified into a holistic experience.

The language model has access to the underlying document, its metadata, and your reading position, so we've found it to be quite effective at extracting detailed information, clarifying random questions that come up while reading, and applying the writer's concepts to domain-specific situations. The LLM also has access to the chat history, so you can more naturally ask follow up questions than in existing Ghostreader.

To give it a try, open up any document and tap the Chat section in the right sidebar (or hit the backtick ` twice). By default, it uses OpenAI's 4o model for quick replies, but you can optionally use the more powerful o3 reasoning model when you're willing to tradeoff speed for intelligence.

Because this is a preview, you might encounter use cases that need improvement. If you do, we'd love your feedback so we can factor it in! This is very much a work-in-progress.

As mentioned above, we're reciprocating this chat upgrade to mobile, which is slightly harder than web because of the limited screen size. Then we'll add the ability to chat not with just a document, but all your documents. Finally, the infrastructure required to power chat sets the foundation for a significantly better Search v2 utilizing advanced hybrid search (combination of full-text and semantic queries) and advanced search operators.

Props to Adam for shouldering this massive project. More to come.

✒️ E‑Ink Mode

Reader has worked on Android-based e‑ink devices for some time, but getting the experience dialed in can be a hassle. If you use a Boox or Daylight, the app should now automatically toggle on E-Ink Mode, which in turn applies a high contrast color palette and reduced animations. You can find this setting in the Appearance panel when inside any document or on the Settings tab.

For us as users, E-Ink Mode combined with EPUBs v2 (and all of Reader's other features) have finally tipped the scales on the ebook experience. It's hard to imagine reading on Kindle at this point 😛

(If you do own a Kindle device, friendly reminder that Reader has a nifty Send to Kindle integration.)

Props to Mati for leading this cleanup. As part of it, we needed to reorganize many of the Reader menus, so you should find those more intuitive as well.

⚡️ Faster Document Opening

One of our general philosophies of building software is: first make it function; then make it fun; finally make it fast. As Reader is entering a more mature state, we're focusing more on performance. You saw that above as part of EPUBs v2, but you should also now notice any document on the mobile apps opening much faster.

In this case, it's easier to show than tell with a before and after:

Props to Artem for finding this refactor opportunity on mobile. Many more to come.

🎧 Audio Reviews

Turning to classic Readwise (included in your subscription), you can now listen to your Daily and Themed Reviews on-the-go with high quality voices and a naturally flowing script.

The moment we encountered NotebookLM's viral "Audio Overviews" feature, which transforms uploaded documents into conversational podcasts, we wondered: what would this be like with the Readwise Daily Review?

We tried converting highlights to an Audio Overview, but quickly learned that we needed to preserve the fidelity of the original highlights rather than discuss their meaning on a meta-level. Then we discovered that simply listening to highlights back-to-back isn't particularly engaging. The experience needed some kind of connective tissue. So we tinkered with different structures until we found a winning formula that flows naturally.

You can click through to listen to a preview. It's already sped up so watch on 1x!

Like podcasts and audiobooks, these Audio Reviews really shine in hands-free situations like driving, commuting, or taking a walk. If you maintain a streak, the audio version will also automatically give you credit for completing your review once you reach the end. Give it a try for yourself on web or mobile by tapping the play button in the top right.

Props for Mati for powering through the trial & error required to get this feature dialed in.

🧠 AI Themed Reviews

Also in classic Readwise, you can now use the power of AI to easily generate Themed Reviews: custom collections of highlights to be resurfaced in the same format as the Daily Review.

Themed Reviews has always been one of our favorite features internally (original announcement blog post), and a cult classic among our long-time users (much like concatenate). But it previously required a heavily tagged corpus of highlights or a lot of manual document selection. Thanks to embeddings and LLMs, creating a themed review is now as easy as entering a natural language topic such as caring for a newborn or applying AI to a reading app or whatever interest is germane to your personal or professional life.

We hope this lowers the bar so more folks get to benefit from it. Create a new Themed Review here!

Next up, we're hoping to lower the bar even further by automatically suggesting themes you might be interested in based on your highlights. We recognize that some folks were prefer to keep AI out of things, so you can disable these features entirely from your Readwise experience on Account Settings.

Props to Ibai, who recently joined us full-time, on shipping his first feature.

📤  Craft Export

The good folks at Craft have built a first-class integration to effortlessly export your highlights from Readwise to your Craft space.

Whenever there's collaboration on one of these integrations, the experience ends up much more seamless. Craft is no exception: highlights come in as blocks on beautifully formatted pages with cover images, titles, authors, tags, and backlinks to the source in Readwise. There's also plenty of customization options to get this dialed in to your bespoke preferences.

Finally, the Craft team is generously offering Readwise users 50% off Craft for life when you sign up at craft.do/readwise (and use the code READWISE50 at checkout)!

🔜 Coming Up

  • Ghostreader v3 – As mentioned in the Chat with Document section, we're already working on reciprocating the feature to mobile and then will add the ability to chat not with just a document, but all your documents.
  • Search v2 – The infrastructure behind Ghostreader v3 will set the foundation for a significantly better and much requested Search v2 utilizing hybrid search (combination of full-text and semantic queries) and advanced search operators.
  • (even more) Ebook Improvements – While the ebook experience took a huge leap forward with EPUBs v2, there's still more we're building and we expect folks to give us a lot of unanticipated feedback too. For example, we're adding time left in chapter, page numbering as a footer option (when the file contains that data), and continuing to hunt down EPUB edge cases.
  • ChatGPT "Highlight" Import – Extremely experimental. For better or worse, people like us who read to learn and do things (what we call reading for betterment in contrast to reading for entertainment) are now increasingly turning to ChatGPT or other LLMs for answers. But just like reading and highlighting a book, this new knowledge flows through us like sand through spread fingers. We're exploring the potential of extracting and then revisiting the insights from these high signal conversations so they can be better applied in life and work. If this sounds useful to you, reply to this email so we can get your early feedback.
  • A lot more - Hopefully it goes without saying, but the above isn't an exhaustive list by any means. We plan to continue investing in the fundamentals of a great reading app with improvements to offline, better performance, parsing, bug fixes, as well as the aforementioned "massive projects".

🍤 Minor Improvements

  • More Robust Position Tracking — Related to EPUBs v2 (though affecting all documents!), you should now find your reading position much more robustly saved across multiple sessions and devices.
  • Newer AI Models — The latest OpenAI models were added to Ghostreader and Chat with Document. GPT-4.1-mini is included in your subscription (a huge step up from 4o-mini, which should mean smarter summaries) and if you bring your own key, you can now use o3 (one of the smartest reasoning models out there) for custom prompts. For clarity, o3 is also included in the Chat with Document preview for now.
  • Readwise MCP Server — You can now enable a variety of AI applications (such as Claude, Cursor, custom scripts, etc) to tap into your Readwise highlights real-time. Early adopters are already experimenting with wild mash‑ups. We have the same thing but with the content of all of your Reader documents on the roadmap, too! You can read how to set up the Readwise MCP with Claude here, or check out Erin's awesome video.
  • Reader API Improvements — You can now fetch documents via tags programmatically, unblocking lots of third‑party dashboards and automation workflows. There were some other API fixes as well, see our API docs here.
  • Mobile File Uploading — You can now add PDFs and EPUBs straight from iOS and Android via their respective share sheets.
  • Desktop Deep‑Linking — You can now enable a setting to make any read.readwise.io link open directly in the Reader desktop app instead of the web browser (if you're into that kind of thing!).
  • Custom iOS Icons — You can choose from a handful of icon color options (including stealth monochrome) so Reader matches the rest of your home screen. Or just because you hate the standard Reader icon.
  • Roam integration – We rebuilt the Roam Research export integration on top of their official API. The new pipeline is faster, far more reliable, and, if you choose, end‑to‑end encrypted so only your graph can read the data. You can switch to this by reconnecting Roam on the export page, and your highlights will flow in with the same structure as before but with fewer hiccups.
  • Various Integration Polish – Twitter thread saving is more reliable, Obsidian full‑text export was fixed to handle huge vaults without timing out, Send‑to‑Kindle now retries automatically, Apple Notes images render better, and Pocket imports no longer stall at daily limits.

🐛 Bug Fixes

As always, the team has been hard at work fixing dozens and dozens of bugs, most reported by you all as well (prepare for a long and incomplete list…):

  • Fixed a ton of RSS feeds that weren't refreshing their latest content
  • Fixed bug where pressing Enter on a Home item showed a blank page.
  • Fixed small “posted at” text on Twitter lists
  • Fixed Android offline-recognition bug
  • Fixed iOS widget showing as a white rectangle
  • Fixed many cut-off pages in paged-scroll mode
  • Fixed crash caused by empty AI-summary prompts
  • Fixed iOS copy-to-clipboard glitch so the share sheet grabs the correct text every time.
  • Fixed bugs for users with multiple Twitter accounts
  • Fixed bug with "time left" displaying negative or blank values
  • Fixed back-icon button from the E-ink Mode page
  • Fixed bug where connections to Roam would expire
  • Fixed bottom menu sticking half-open on Android
  • Fixed highlight display for certain EPUBs (missing or mis-ordered highlights)
  • Fixed PDF parsing status getting stuck after edits
  • Fixed bug where sharing highlight as an image wouldn't work
  • Fixed YouTube transcript auto-scrolling
  • Fixed cross-device sync resets
  • Fixed custom cover images on iOS lock-screen TTS
  • Fixed oversized tag/note icons in some books
  • Fixed invisible scrollbar in Dark Mode on iPhone
  • Fixed TTS timer to show leading zeros (04:30)
  • Fixed “Invalid prompt template” error breaking AI summaries
  • Fixed buttons overlapping highlight notes
  • Fixed Wisereads header being cut off on phones
  • Fixed duplicate lines in enhanced YouTube transcripts
  • Fixed mobile EPUB tables of contents not loading
  • Fixed inability to remove RSS feeds tied to bad queries
  • Fixed Quoteshot downloads on Chrome iOS
  • Fixed Android action sheets failing to open when animations are disabled
  • Fixed empty documents caused by backed-up large imports
  • Fixed Twitter thread saves that grabbed only the first tweet
  • Fixed navigation through EPUB TOCs added after May 15
  • Fixed stuck fade at top of YouTube transcripts
  • Fixed highlight becoming invisible after resize drag
  • Fixed unreliable PDF area-selection tool
  • Fixed jerk when toggling original-styling button
  • Fixed blank screen for iOS 7.8 TestFlight users
  • Fixed overloaded Pocket import connection
  • Fixed delayed focus indicator on web (keyboard navigation)
  • Fixed truncated remaining-read times on long author names (mobile)
  • Fixed jerky image zoom on iOS
  • Fixed feedback text loss when closing the box accidentally
  • Fixed TTS skip-to-end rewind & pause flicker; removed newline pause bug
  • Fixed duplicate PDF highlights deletion bug (mobile)
  • Fixed extra page animations on e-ink devices
  • Fixed missing highlight handles/underlines
  • Fixed category logic edge-case that blocked parsing
  • Fixed auto-advance after delete/shortlist on web
  • Fixed image state not resetting between viewed images
  • Fixed newsletters rendering unstyled in original mode
  • Fixed Ghostreader prompt block without personal API key
  • Fixed Twitter thread saving after X API change
  • Fixed crashes on unusual PDFs
  • Fixed dark-text-on-dark code blocks (light mode)
  • Fixed hidden filtered views in home-screen editor
  • Fixed Android “back” navigation right after login
  • Fixed unresponsive “Edit Metadata” on iOS
  • Fixed blank error message when opening private docs on desktop
  • Fixed Kindle digests ignoring metadata overrides
  • Fixed iOS edit-metadata button unresponsive
  • Fixed missing home-view options when many views existed
  • Fixed garbled V8 TTS when the word “somewhere” appeared
  • Fixed image snapping in Focus Mode
  • Fixed repeated manual Instapaper imports
  • Fixed landscape paged-scroll break
  • Fixed Android Daily Digest infinite loader
  • Fixed nav instability with “Reduced Motion”
  • Fixed modals hiding behind interface
  • Fixed public links/bundles not loading with empty name
  • Fixed newsletter content pushed right in original mode
  • Fixed incorrect highlighted-at date updates
  • Fixed blank Android notification icon on lock-screen
  • Fixed transcript follow when video resized & summary visible
  • Fixed TTS progress not saving in background
  • Fixed Kindle digest frequency resetting to zero
  • Fixed paged-scroll break on very long headers
  • Fixed dead tap zone at bottom of documents
  • Fixed unreadable highlights on light-text pages & WiseUp save in extension
  • Fixed Roam export preview styling inaccuracies
  • Fixed cross-device desync & improved Notion export robustness
  • Fixed misaligned document counts & unresponsive sidebar close on iOS
  • Fixed garbled TTS phoneme bug
  • Fixed YouTube stutter and transcript cruft
  • Fixed uneditable custom Ghostreader prompts
  • Fixed unscrollable language menu in YouTube transcripts
  • Fixed note-edit blank overwrite on Safari/desktop app
  • Sanitized export filenames with non-Latin or special characters
  • Fixed camera focus in OCR highlighter
  • Fixed weekly Kindle digests not sending
  • Fixed broken full-doc links in Obsidian
  • Fixed paged-image reading-position loss
  • Fixed documents reopening at top instead of last position
  • Sanitized filenames with tabs/newlines in exports
  • Fixed misaligned image captions
  • Fixed Android keyboard overlapping note/tag fields
  • Fixed sharing glitches (Instagram Stories & ChatGPT app)
  • Fixed offline detection during Android sessions
  • Fixed white-rectangle Readwise widget on iOS
  • Fixed reading-progress accuracy and text cut-off after highlight
  • Fixed swipe-back gesture on iOS
  • Fixed Twitter saves in Safari extension
  • Fixed stale tag list in share sheets & browser extensions
  • Fixed chat searching wrong tags & restored streaming responses
  • Fixed bug where embedded videos would autoplay
  • Fixed bug where youtube videos would show up with no transcript
  • Fixed the formatting of Youtube Shorts in Reader
  • Fixed bug where text-to-speech would start from the beginning of the document every time on Android
  • Parsing fixes – We continue to have an engineer dedicating to fixing reported parsing issues on all of the following domains (across tens of thousands of articles): abc.es, acoup.blog, ansa.it, apple.news, archive.is, arxiv.org, bbc.com, bloomberg.com, bonappetit.com, buttondown.com, businessinsider.com, chatgpt.com, dailymail.co.uk, densediscovery.com, dev.to, every.to, epsilontheory.com, espn.com, firstthings.com, flip.it, fortelabs.com, france24.com, g1.globo.com, habr.com, heise.de, highagency.com, independent.co.uk, lemonde.fr, linkedin.com, marginalrevolution.com, medium.com, nature.com, newyorker.com, nypost.com, nysfocus.com, openai.com, platform.openai.com, reddit.com, reuters.com, royalroad.com, screenrant.com, sciencedirect.com, seekingalpha.com, simplywall.st, smashingmagazine.com, spectrum.ieee.org, stackoverflow.com, stratechery.com, substack.com, sueddeutsche.de, techcrunch.com, theathletic.com, theguardian.com, theverge.com, towardsdatascience.com, wired.com, wsj.com, xkcd.com, yahoo.com

🖼️ Creator Content

Maneetpaul Singh

In his latest video, e-ink expert Maneetpaul Singh shares how he switched from Kobo and Kindle to Reader for his graduate studies.

Josh Snyman

In his latest review of The Four Agreements, booktuber Josh Snyman also shares how he uses Readwise to remember the best parts of what he's read.

Erin Moore (Daily Review)

In our last update, Erin updated our Reader intro series. Now she's updated our much outdated video guide to the Readwise Daily Review.

Erin Moore (Craft)

Our community manager Erin released an explainer video alongside Craft's in-house video describing how to sync your Readwise highlights to Craft.

Kevin Yee

Kevin Yee just dropped an in-depth tutorial covering Reader's most important features. He also answers the question… is Reader actually worth it? 👀

👋 Farewell

That's all for now. As a reminder, if you're interested in testing a big thing we're building, Sign up as an early tester →

Thank you again for your continued support — and as always, feel free to reach out with questions, feedback, or just to share your reading adventures!

Until next time,
– The Readwise Team