Hey all,

I'm happy to deliver this public beta newsletter #10 describing the latest round of Readwise Reader updates 🙂

I write this newsletter every one to two months covering features we've just shipped, bugs we've recently fixed, and what we intend to work on next. I also share tips and 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.

While we send these comprehensive updates only every so often to be mindful of your email inboxes, folks sometimes ask us if we have a place where we share updates more frequently. We try to do that through our various social media channels, but to bring even more rigor that practice, our customer support team is firing up a new, weekly newsletter called Wise Up!

Wise Up! will contain a weekly changelog, new documentation and product videos, tips & tricks for both Readwise and Reader, and some other goodies. Because of its frequency, we're making this newsletter opt-in. If you'd like to sign-up in advance, we welcome you to add your email to this list!

On to the product updates:

• 👨‍🔧 Multiple Refactors – We’ve finished up significant behind-the-scenes improvements to Reader’s infrastructure (described below), resulting in fewer bugs, faster performance, and quicker development speed going forward.
• 📲 Send to Kindle – You can now manually send individual documents from Reader to your Kindle as well as automatically send a "digest" of newly saved articles weekly or daily.
• 🗑️ Trash Bin – Now when you delete documents, they'll initially go to a trash bin where you'll have an opportunity to recover them or permanently delete.
• 🐇 Return to Reading Position – You can now hop around documents with more confidence knowing you can always return to where you left off. Also, if you accidentally lose your place, you can easily return to your farthest read position.
• 💬 YouTube Transcript Cleanup – You can now trigger Reader to clean up the YouTube-generated transcript using GPT, fixing issues such as lack of capitalization, punctuation, and logical paragraph breaks.

👨‍🔧 Multiple Refactors

Much of our team was consumed through late summer and early fall with some behind-the-scenes refactors of Reader infrastructure. For fear of using too much jargon, a "refactor" is when a software company improves and reorganizes an application's internal code without necessarily changing how it works for the user. It's not our favorite work because we much prefer to be building cool new features, but it's a necessary evil of maintaining a complex cross-platform application.

The good news is we're done and the investment in these refactors do yield tangible dividends including fewer bugs, faster performance, and quicker development speed going forward.

For those of you interested in the behind-the-scenes:

Upgraded Client-Side Database

First, we updated the core database used by the Reader apps (web, iOS, Android, and desktop) to make all your content quickly accessible offline. This work not only helps overall performance, but also resolves some bugs, such as documents disappearing on mobile when you open them from a tag filter, and unlocks some user experience improvements, such as longer summary metadata (ie you can now take advantage of longer Ghostreader summaries).

Props to Hannes for shouldering this burden.

Rewritten Browser Extensions

Second, we rewrote our browser extensions (including Chrome, Arc, Brave, and Safari). This was motivated by a massive change in standards that Google (as the maker of the most widely used browser in the world) forced upon the extension ecosystem called Manifest v3.

If all the Reader browser extension did was save the URL of your current page to our server, this rewrite would have been relatively easy. But as you know, our extension is quite powerful sending not only the URL to our server, but also the entire rendered content of the web page for saving behind paywalls. It also enables you to highlight the native web page, add notes and tags to both highlights and the document, and bidirectionally render those annotations on both the native web page and in the Reader apps.

The original extensions took us months to build, so unsurprisingly it took us a few months to rewrite them. Thankfully, that's now over.

If you're curious to learn more about Manifest v3 and Google's not-so-altruistic motivations (read: to kneecap adblockers in support of their advertising business), here's a great primer.

Props to Adam for building these extensions. (Again.)

📲 Send to Kindle

Reading on your computer, phone, or tablet is nice, but let's face it: for some of us, e-ink is better. Many folks have started using Reader on a new generation of Android-based e-ink devices such as the Onyx Boox or Daylight Computer. Those are great, but these devices are still for the early adopters, and most people who already own Kindles don't want to buy yet another gadget.

If that describes you, you're in luck. You can now send documents from your Reader account directly to your Kindle device. This includes fully parsed and formatted web articles (with images) as well as EPUB and PDF files.

If you want to put things on auto-pilot, you can tell Reader to automatically send a "digest" of newly saved articles either daily or weekly.

Visit the Integrations section of your Preferences on web to setup the Kindle connection.

Disclaimer: As you might know, one of the greatest drawbacks of sending documents to Kindle is that any highlights made there will not automatically synchronize with Readwise or Reader. The only way to extract highlights from "personal documents" (as Kindle calls them) is to grab a text file on the device called My Clippings.txt by plugging it in via USB. You can upload that file to Readwise, but we recognize that's a lot of work. We wish we had a better solution here, but this is just how Amazon built Kindle.

Props to Rasul on figuring out this intricate integration.

🗑️ Trash Bin

They used to say you don't have real product-market fit until your app has dark mode. Dark mode has since become table stakes, and the new gold standard of PMF is a trash bin. We're delighted to share that we can finally tell people that Reader is "like Pocket, but it has a trash bin".

I'm kidding, of course. We're actually quite excited to finally be in a position to start maturing the Reader product by focusing on this kind of functionality that one must strategically defer earlier on in the product lifecycle. (With an all-in-one tool like Reader, there's a lot of this yet to be done.)

You can find the Trash section on web in the left sidebar where you can recover individual documents or permanently delete all.

The Trash section on web

And you can find it in the mobile apps in the Library side panel and the bottom of the Search tab.

Props to Johannes on his first shipped feature 💪

🐇 Return to Reading Position

Speaking of polish, one paper cut that's bothered users – and us – since the early days of Reader is accidentally losing your place while reading. When that happened, it'd be quite frustrating to find your way back to where you left off.

In the mobile apps, it's now easy for you to always return to your last reading position. Whether you leave it intentionally or unintentionally, a new indicator will now appear at the bottom of the screen. If you tap it, you'll transport back to your previous reading position. If you x it out, your reading position will update to your current scroll position.

Going deeper, Reader has two concepts of position: (1) farthest read position and (2) scroll position. You can see these signified in the app as the purple gradient (your farthest read position) and the gray dot (your scroll position).

Most of the time, as you read at a normal pace, these positions will be in sync. The scroll position only detaches from the farthest read position whenever you either skim the document at a reading speed faster than what's humanly possible or navigate the document using an internal link such as the table of contents. Now whenever the two positions detach, a return indicator appears giving you the option of going back to where you left off. If you don't want to go back, you can update your farthest read position to your current scroll position by closing the indicator.

You could think of this feature as serving the same role as that handy satin ribbon page marker you sometimes find attached to reference books like cookbooks and dictionaries. The ribbon generally follows you, invisibly, as you read at a normal pace. But if you flip forward or backwards, the ribbon stays where you left off waiting for you to either return or pull it out entirely.

I used that black ribbon page marker last night to hop back and forth between pâte à choux and crème pâtissière to bake some pumpkin spice éclairs.

This is a sensitive and subtle feature. We think we ironed out all the wrinkles before and immediately after shipping, but if you're encountering any situations where the return indicator is interfering rather than helping, let us know and we'll promptly take a look. If you're really not a fan, you can always disable the feature entirely from the Customize Appearance panel (under More settings...).

Props to Mati and Artem on this delicate UX.

💬 YouTube Transcript Cleanup

Whenever you save a YouTube video, Reader will pull the transcript generated by YouTube for the captions as the corresponding timestamped text. For some odd reason, Google isn't applying their advanced artificial intelligence technology to repair these transcripts with proper punctuation, capitalization, paragraph breaks, etc. Instead, they often come into Reader in a woefully raw format.

Fortunately, you can now trigger Reader to clean up YouTube transcripts. Reader will process the raw transcript through ChatGPT to get back a version which attempts to fix all the formatting issues while still preserving the timestamps.

You can trigger this on web using the "enhanced transcript" button in the top left of the reading view (shown below), or on mobile from the bottom sheet.

The enhanced transcript is perfect for highlighting, allowing you to capture ideas from YouTube videos in a clean form you can actually understand!

Props to Mati, the YouTube whisperer, for figuring this out.

🔜 Coming Up

• New features to the original Readwise – The majority of our development effort over the past two years has been focused on making Reader amazing. While we're not slowing down on Reader, there are quite a few improvements we've been itching to make to Readwise as well, to help you unlock even more value from your highlights and notes. From mundane improvements (better design/UX) to more exciting ones (AI-enabled features such as "chat with your highlights" and more). You should see Readwise get better in the same way Reader has. There's a longer story here around merging the two apps as well, but we'll leave that for another time...
• EPUB Performance Refactor – Speaking of refactors, we mentioned last time that we're changing how EPUBs are loaded in the client-side application to unlock faster performance and various book-specific affordances. This refactor is nearly done, and should mean that EPUB loading (and every interaction inside of books) is much much faster.
• More Long-Form Improvements – After the EPUB performance refactor, we'll continue on making the experience of reading long-form documents on Reader even more elevated, improving things such as offline reading, chapter starts and ends, internal links, footnotes/endnotes, and more.
• Full Document Export – We pioneered the whole "export your notes and highlights" to your note-taking app feature. This has since become table stakes for a modern reading app. With the advent of AI, folks now want not only the highlights exported, but the full document content exported too. We're building this for select note-taking apps starting with Obsidian.
• Redesigned Frontmatter – The frontmatter refers to the beginning of a document where you see metadata such as the cover image, source, title, author, published date, and so on. We've redesigned this on the mobile apps to be much prettier while making room for your Ghostreader summary to be expanded and collapsed without having to go into the sidebar.
• Apple Notes Export – You've seen the meme. The technology now exists to midwit Apple Notes as well.

🦐 Minor Improvements

• Faster Tagging on Save – As part of the refactors mentioned above, we refactored how tagging works when saving documents via the mobile share sheets and browser extension. You should find the tagging menu to be somewhere between 10x and 100x faster than before. In addition, the sorting of the tags in the menu now matches how it works in the app.
• Smoother Highlight Resizing – We released highlight resizing last update and have continued to improve the UX to be smoother and more precise, especially on e-ink devices.
• Enhanced RSS Feed Search – It's now much easier to find the RSS feed you're looking for within the app. The results display faster and search across all the feed's metadata that we have in our system.
• Notion Integration via API – We originally created our Notion export feature before Notion had a public API. Notion subsequently shipped an API, but for a long time it was lacking the features we needed to recreate the integration without loss of functionality. All of those issues have been addressed, so we rebuilt the Notion export to now use the public API. Not only is this new integration more durable and safer, it also enables you to do new things like customize your column names in your Readwise database. You can now update to the new Notion integration from the Export page (hit Notion and you should see a prompt to update if you're on the old version).
• Longer Ghostreader Summaries – Thanks to the database refactor mentioned above, you can now generate longer summaries with Ghostreader.
• General Parsing Improvements – We included the full list of 30+ domains we fixed parsing for down below, but here are two notable generalized fixes. 1. The New York Times: You should now be able to save articles from the native NYTimes app. 2. Figure Captions: The captions underneath images should now format better and more consistently across all articles.
• Accessible Delete Button on Mobile – Many users want the "delete" button to be more accessible inside of the reading view on mobile. It now is! You should be able to delete on any doc with only two taps now (open the bottom sheet, and hit the now immediately visible "Delete document" button).
• Import from Omnivore – We were sad to hear about Omnivore shutting down on Tuesday. On that same Tuesday, we shipped an importing tool to get all of your documents from Omnivore into Reader.
• Third Party Integrations – Voicenotes (a great, voice-powered note-taking aka scribe tool) and TRMNL (a new e-ink display) both connect to Readwise

🐛 Bug Fixes

As Reader matures as a product, more and more of our focus is on hunting down edge cases, corner cases, and bugs.

• Fixed bug where tagged articles would disappear from the tag view after opening on mobile and desktop. (This was one of our most reported, hard to pin down bugs! Excited to finally have it fixed.)
• Fixed issue where the iOS app would crash when opening specific PDFs.
• Fixed bug where taking a note in a PDF would jump you to the first page of the document.
• Fixed issue where “Skim Mode” would sometimes not mark documents as seen.
• Fixed bug where some documents or highlights weren’t importing from Pocket properly.
• Prevented accidental highlighting of large sections of a document, ensuring highlights are not lost.
• Fixed issue with the email original view not displaying correctly.
• Fixed bug with the Obsidian sync extension.
• Fixed issue with Medium highlight syncing.
• Fixed bug on Android e-ink devices where logging in with email and password wouldn’t work.
• Fixed issue where boox devices in high contrast mode would not display highlights in dark mode properly.
• Fixed bug where Ghostreader could not detect the document language.
• Fixed issue where hitting “Read Now” from the share sheet would sometimes open the app to a blank screen.
• Fixed bug where RSS articles would sometimes appear to be published in the future.
• Fixed issue where zooming into a PDF would cause it to become off-center.
• Fixed bug where the YouTube transcript indicator was displaying the wrong color.
• Fixed bug where the first page in Paged Scroll mode was unresponsive to highlighting.
• Fixed issue where the Android app would crash when logging out.
• Fixed bug where swiping to close a sidebar on Android would open the other sidebar.
• Fixed issue where PDFs could get stuck on a specific highlight and not allow scrolling away.
• Fixed bug where adding a tag on web wouldn’t always close the tag menu.
• Fixed issue where mobile users with a default screen of “Currently Reading” could land on a “Document Not Found” screen.
• Fixed bug in Paged Scroll mode where images would format weirdly.
• Improved formatting of bullet-style images in EPUBs.
• Fixed bug where Skim Mode UI would show a black screen on first load.
• Fixed jerkiness when highlighting near punctuation on mobile.
• Fixed bug with the new “Find in Document” feature creating duplicate hits.
• Fixed highlighting bug in Paged Scroll mode where the wrong page would be scrolled to.
• Fixed issue where the “Read Now” button would take you to the document list instead of the document you saved.
• Fixed bug where some shortcuts would incorrectly show “Shortcut already in use” when attempting to customize.
• Fixed bug where the Feed view would load indefinitely if empty
• Fixed bug on Android where swiping wouldn't close the side panels properly.
• Fixed bug where app would sometimes error when first setting up on a new device (and made the setup faster).
• Fixed bug where documents couldn't be sent to kindle standalone if they'd already been sent as part of a digest.
• Fixed bug where appearance styling couldn't be changed on certain older operating systems.
• Fixed a glitch with the "clean view" toggle for emails on mobile
• Fixed bug where the reading progress would not always be able to reach 100%
• Fixed bug where customizing the colors for sharing a highlight image wasn't working
• Fixed a bug where saving a tweet multiple times via browser extension would create duplicates
• Fixed bug where the browser extension would sometimes interfere with the css styles of sites
• Fixed a bug preventing certain EPUBs from advancing past the cover image without crashing
• Fixed many bugs in the display of highlights in the new Notion export
• Fixed a bug preventing PDFs from opening to their last read location.
• Fixed bug where reading position was too sensitive
• Fixed bug where highlights would disappear when resize completed
• Fixed bug where the "read now" button from the mobile share sheet would open the list view instead of the saved document
• Fixed issue where small images in EPUB would display at an erroneously large size
• Fixed highlighting issue where special characters would make the text move
• Fixed bug where sometimes highlighting in an EPUB could crash the app
• Fixed bug where "shortcut already in use" error would show up for no reason
• Fixed issue where long email addresses would overflow on the Account screen
• Fixed issue where YouTube shorts/lives wouldn't always import correctly
• Fixed bug where app would jerk back and forth after highlighting in Paged Scroll mode
• Fixed bug where saved filtered views with incorrect filter syntax could freeze the app
• Fixed bug where public share links of documents wouldn't render paragraph breaks
• Fixed bug where unread counts sometimes didn't update after marking documents as seen
• Fixed bug where the "find in document" feature would be too slow or incorrect on long documents
• Fixed a bug where tapping a PDF's highlight in the notebook wouldn't always navigate to it correctly
• Fixed bug where feeds could sometimes appear in incorrect folders
• Fixed bug where some images weren't appearing inside of articles
• Text-to-Speech (TTS)
  • Fixed bug where TTS sometimes wouldn’t start playing correctly.
  • Fixed issue where the Listen button would need to be tapped twice for TTS to work.
  • Fixed issue where TTS option would be hard to find on emails/PDFs
  • Fixed bug where TTS wouldn’t show a loader when loading audio.
• iPad/Tablet Fixes
  • Fixed issue where highlighting on iPad devices could make the app unresponsive.
  • Fixed bug where rotating a tablet device would shift the content incorrectly.
  • Fixed issue with opening the sidebar in landscape mode.
  • Fixed bug with tags created via mobile share sheets.
• Parsing fixes! Since the last update, we fixed known parsing issues on all of the following domains (across tens of thousands of articles):
  • bbc.co.uk
    bbc.com
    archive.is
    reuters.com
    wallstreetcn.com
    apple.com
    tagesspiegel.de
    theinitium.com
    bizjournals.com
    huxiu.com
    sspai.com
    academialatin.com
    nytimes.com
    pitchfork.com
    gwern.net
    goodnotes.com
    economist.com
    github.com
    theverge.com
    wsj.com
    36kr.com
    wikipedia.org
    ft.com
    every.to
    kottke.org
    hbr.com
    learn.microsoft.com
    switowski.com
    chatgpt.com
    uber.com
    linkedin.com
  • (Please keep your parsing reports coming in, we really use them!)

📼 Creator Content

The Verge

We’re honored to be the only read-it-later app mentioned in The Verge’s latest praise of the Boox Palma. We’ll be polishing off the e-ink and long-form reading experience even more in the coming months with a significant performance refactor (helping large ebooks will load faster), chapter-based progress metrics, and better handling of internal links and footnotes.

Casey Newton

Esteemed tech journalist Casey Newton recently shared how he’s using Ghostreader (Reader’s embedded AI assistant) to quickly digest information from big court cases for his newsletter, Platformer.

Marques Brownlee

In September, we discovered Readwise has secured some real estate on Marques Brownlee’s Boox device. You can check out his full review of the iPhone-sized e-reader here.

Jasmine Sun

Jasmin Sun recently anointed Readwise as “the best piece of software I use on a daily basis.” High praise, coming from one of Substack’s leading product managers and founder of Reboot!

Raiza Martin on Lenny’s Newsletter

We were flattered when we learned this how Steven Johnson was using Readwise to power his NotebookLM workflow. So much so that he inspired Raiza Martin, Senior Product Manager of GoogleLM, to mention it during her talk with Lenny Ratchitsky too.

👋 Farewell

In my last update, I had posted a role for a Senior/Staff Engineer. After meeting all kinds of great people, we're excited to officially welcome Johannes Herrmann to the team. Like most of our colleagues, Johannes is a long-time user of Readwise and Reader

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