I'm excited to publish public beta newsletter #3 sharing our most recent Readwise Reader updates 🙂

As a reminder, I write this newsletter approximately every 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 linked here.

The themes over the past month are mostly the same as my last update: we've been smashing bugs, fixing random UX glitches, and refactoring infrastructure to enable both our team and our apps to run faster. As a result, we've shipped fewer user-facing functionality than we'd typically expect. That said, there's still plenty of exciting features to share today including:

• TTS refactor – You can now seek and start text-to-speech anywhere in the document, highlight using your AirPods, and more.
• Download highlighted PDFs – You can now download any PDF you upload and highlight in Reader with those highlights & notes embedded in the file. You can also print any parsed HTML document to PDF with your highlights overlaid.
• Highlight management in Notebook – You can now operate on highlights in the Notebook sidebar of the web app, the first step in migrating Readwise 1.0 functionality into Reader.
• Multiselect of feeds, tags, and Views – You can now operate on feed sources, tags, and Views in bulk, the first step in adding multiselect throughout Reader.
• Image actions on mobile – You can now note, tag, and – most importantly – copy & share images in the mobile app.
• Profile & preferences refactor on mobile – The information hierarchy of managing your account settings and app preferences has been significantly cleaned up on mobile.

After discussing these features, we'll go through all the small improvements, bug fixes, and features currently under development. Let's get into it!

Text-to-Speech Refactor 🔊🔧

Our first version of text-to-speech (TTS) was cool, but it had a lot of sharp edges. To take TTS to the next level, Artem had to dismantle what he previously built and then put it back together again. He's now performed that refactor, which enables us to extend functionality in several ways.

The first is you can now seek to an arbitrary starting position in the document described in this video that Erin was kind enough to make.

Just as important, text-to-speech is simply more robust and less glitchy than it was before, particularly on Android devices.

Related to text-to-speech but separate from Artem's refactor, Mitch added the ability to customize your "headphone gestures" (aka AirPod taps) to control TTS. I personally use a double tap to highlight the current paragraph and triple tap to jump backwards, but the choice is yours!

Click the profile button in top right to get to Account Settings

Finally, this refactor has paved the way to reenable TTS on EPUBs, which is already a work-in-progress. In addition, we're close to having the infrastructure ready to enable non-English languages (document-level language detection), TTS on forwarded emails (better email parsing), and TTS in the web app.

Download highlighted PDFs 💾

As promised, work is now underway on deepening the PDF capabilities within Reader, led by Mati. The first feature shipped here is the ability to download any uploaded PDF with your notes & highlights contained therein.

In addition, you can also print any parsed HTML document (ie a saved web article) to PDF with your highlights as well.

More subtly, but just as important, your zoom, rotation, and light/dark mode settings now persist across sessions on a per-document level.

We have dozens of other PDF enhancements in the works including thumbnail-based navigation, page number based navigation, more robust position saving, better PDF cover images, better annotation bar on mobile, snapshotting, and lots more. Maybe we'll even figure out how to fix those pesky line-breaks in the conversion to plain-text highlights.

Pro-tip: View as text. As a pro-tip to those of you relatively new to Reader, one of the most powerful PDF features already in Reader is the View as text option on desktop and mobile. This is especially helpful when you have a simple text-heavy PDF on mobile that you just want to read without pinching and repositioning all the time.

Refowable text!

Highlight management in Notebook 📒✨

Before embarking on a long and arduous quest to refactor how our app holds state in memory (in other words: make the user interface 10x faster), Adam upgraded the Notebook tab of the right sidebar on web. In addition to navigating to the highlight in the source document, you can also perform all kinds of highlight actions from tagging & annotating to deleting.

You can operate on highlights from the list view too.

Like almost everything in the Reader web app, you can perform these actions with the keyboard. The core shortcut is ` (backtick, beneath the tilde ~) which cycles through the right sidebar tabs. From there, you can use the up and down arrows to focus highlights and then take actions. The key highlight is M to open the "more" context menu.

For those of you who come to Reader from Readwise 1.0 (we 💖 you), you can maybe see how this represents the first milestone on the path of recreating Readwise 1.0 functionality inside Reader. You might need to squint, but it's there!

Multiselect on feeds, tags, and Views 📚🔀

Now that Reader has some traction, we've had to spend more and more time paying down what we call "product debt". These are the features that may not be innovative or unique, but they're necessary to keep users happy overall. Multiselect is one such feature.

Mati has shipped the first iteration of multiselect starting with the feeds, tags, and Views management pages. You can now do things like delete, merge, rename, and add to Views (ie folders) en masse.

You'll see this same multiselect component on the tags and Views management pages too.

Once the performance refactor Adam is working on is complete (described below), we'll revisit multiselect on documents.

Image actions on mobile 📱🖼️

On mobile, you can now perform some previously missing actions to images such as copying the image to clipboard or sharing it via the share sheet.

New tray makes it way easier to back out of an image too.

These actions aren't terribly common, but it sure is frustrating when you wanted to copy an image and couldn't. No more!

Profile & preferences refactor on mobile 📱⚙️

Last update we shared that we cleaned up a lot of the information hierarchy of how profile, account, and app preferences were organized on the web app. We've since applied the same to the mobile app.

Achieving the right balance of discoverability with simplicity is a constant work in progress, but these changes are so much better than what we had before.

Coming Up 🔜

• Performance – App performance (i.e., speed of the user interface) remains our #1 priority. Once we make the app perform faster, so many other issues melt away and new projects open up before us. The good news is (1) we know what to do to 10x performance and (2) the refactor is underway by Adam.
• RSS server-side refactor – Broadly speaking, there are two RSS use cases in Reader. The first, where we began, is the modern Substack email newsletter consumer who subscribes to a variety of low volume feeds. Feed is working pretty well for these folks. The second use case is OG RSS feed reader pro who subscribes to many high volume feeds. Feed is not working so well for these folks. To unlock this use case, there are several frontend updates we must make. But before those, we also need to refactor RSS on the server-side to make sure each RSS feed is updating even more quickly and accurately to get to parity with other infovore alternatives. Tadek is well underway here.
• PDFs v2 – As mentioned above, Mati has dozens of other PDF enhancements in the works including thumbnail-based navigation, page number based navigation, more robust position saving, better PDF cover images, better annotation bar on mobile, snapshotting, and lots more.
• Ghostreader v2 — Those OpenAI guys are shipping fast, huh? Every time we get excited to start working on the next iteration of GPT in Reader, aka Ghostreader, OpenAI drops something new that forces us to completely reevaluate our assumptions. That's okay – Hannes is working on a bunch of GPT features that we can confidently build including much better summarization UX, a migration of our prompts to gpt-3.5-turbo and gpt-4, and others.
• Quoteshots – As part of recreating Readwise 1.0 functionality inside Reader, we're adding a quoteshot feature to convert a salient text highlight to a beautiful image. Jesse has designed some truly elegant themes that will take our hacky Readwise 1.0 quoteshotting to the next level.

The items above are major features that are already underway. After these ship, we'll begin pagination, more Readwise 1.0 migration, and Search v2. We also have a new parsing engineer starting on April 11th who'll soon begin crushing parsing tickets.

Minor Improvements 🦐

• Worked with the Reflect team to build a Readwise-Reflect integration (we really enjoyed working with those guys).
• Upgraded searches to use a URL parameter (such as read.readwise.io/search?q=reading) so you can refresh and bookmark specific queries. Props to Hannes for shipping something on his first day.
• Added support for JSON-based RSS feeds.
• Added option to disable haptics (in-app vibrations).
• Ensured that PDF zoom, rotation, and light/dark mode settings now persist across sessions on a per-document level.
• Added per-document language metadata, which improves length estimates for documents in non-English languages and paves the way for us to add better character encoding, non-English TTS, automatic RTL detection, and more.
• Upgraded handling of large files uploaded via iOS and Android apps.
• Enabled sorting YouTube videos by true video length (rather than inferred transcript reading time).

Bug Fixes 🐛

• Fixed bug with highlights ordering incorrectly in the sidebar.
• Fix bug with Ghostreader not always working on YouTube transcripts.
• Fixed bug causing documents to scroll to the top on web after reading on mobile.
• Fixed bug with PDFs scrolling to the top when reopened on web.
• Fixed bug causing "document not found" screen when unsubscribing from a feed on mobile.
• Fixed bug with RSS feed items displaying unescaped characters in title/metadata.
• Fixed temporary bug affecting highlighting functionality.
• Fixed bug with email imports containing incorrect links.
• Fixed bug causing clients not to sync after massive bulk deletion.
• Fixed Pocket import issues that occasionally missed fetching some articles.
• Fixed bug where Firefox extension could disrupt certain site layouts.
• Fixed bug causing highlights to split into separate articles in RW1.0 when using the web highlighter.
• Fixed bug with document tags syncing issues for Obsidian and Logseq.
• Fixed bug with Ghostreader highlight menu not showing up on mobile.
• Fixed bug causing Notion exports to load indefinitely.
• Fixed bug with sorting by title not working properly.
• Fixed bug causing Text-to-Speech (TTS) to restart while listening.
• Fixed bug with RSS feeds containing special characters not working.
• Fixed bug where spacebar didn't function as a keyboard shortcut.
• Fixed bugs related to Evernote export (thanks Roxine).
• Fixed bug with inconsistent references to "Later" and "Inbox."
• Fixed bug where line breaks wouldn't display in shared document annotations.
• Fixed bug with Readwise Android app compatibility for newer OS versions.
• Fixed bug with missing Gmail auto-forwards.
• Fixed bug affecting Google Play Books highlight importing to RW1.0.
• Fixed several broken RSS feeds, including Hacker Newsletter and Stratechery.
• Fixed bug with Twitter save-via-reply feature breaking due to API changes.
• Fixed bug causing the app to crash when sorting documents by author on Android.
• Fixed numerous web app styling bugs exclusive to Safari.
• Fixed bug with subscription issues when subscribing to Reader on iOS after canceling Readwise on the web.
• Fixed formatting of links saved via Product Hunt.
• Fixed improper categorization of YouTube videos imported from Pocket/Instapaper.
• Fixed bug preventing the app from loading for users with 80k+ documents.

Creator Content 📼

Vassilena Valchanova

One of the most common questions we’re asked by users if how to keep a tidy Reader account and prevent the age-old overload problem so common to read-it-later apps. In her in-depth tutorial, Vassilena takes you through her daily Reader routine.

Emowe

Emowe put together one of the first Spanish video guides for Reader. You’ll learn (en español) how he uses Reader and Readwise together to build the ultimate PKM system.

Tomi Nuottamo

If you’re still getting your bearings with Reader, Tomi Nuottamo’s beginner walkthrough will take you through all the fundamentals, including our favorite way to subscribe to an author (2:48) and how he leverages Ghostreader for vetting articles before reading them (7:09).

Conrad Carriker

Conrad put together this heartwarming (to us) overview of how he uses both Readwise and Reader as linchpins in his knowledge management workflow. Love this 💖

Evan Rauner

In the Readwise Community Discord, Evan shares his "frictionless and efficient" workflow for extracting insights from YouTube videos here.

Farewell 👋

Over the past month, we've been fortunate to have Hannes join our engineering team as well as work with a mercurial Mitch until whenever his feet start to itch again. Welcome Hannes and welcome back Mitch!

Oh yeah, Mitch has been cookin' on a long-awaited feature dropping sometime next week that I forgot to mention in this newsletter. Keep your eyes peeled for that 😎

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