Blinkist Review

I spent a week doing the Blinkist free 7-day trial. I tried it after hearing about it on Darknet Diaries (epic podcast). It's a neat way to hack reading, giving you professional grade spark notes in an audible like format. These modern spark notes are called "blinks" and they are the major concepts of the book, often read to the listener in an audio format. As an avid reader this was an intriguing service, but I was really on the fence throughout the entire trial. Ultimately, I decided to go with the service and I'll tell you why in this post. I also decided I'm going to do another review when my subscription is up in a year. I almost didn't go with the service for a lot of reasons. First off, I didn't like the pricing model. The subscription goes from a 7 day free trial, to $99 a year, with no intermediary or pay as you go options. That pricing model felt suspect to me, like I would get bored of it or it would lose value in a few months. I also felt like $99 was too expensive. The flip side of that model is Blinkist is probably a startup trying to show subscription growth and pay back their investors. I decided to go with Blinkist for a year and I'll tell you why in this review, it was a hard sell as I was hesitant like many others.

Let's start with the positives. I really enjoyed the turbo books. I felt like I learned a ton and super quick. I was 'digesting' lots of books that I had always been interested in, but never inspired enough to read. It was also great for previewing a book and finding books I didn't like. At first I started listening to a lot of self help and skill based books. I got innumerable tips to improve my own skills, from writing and speed reading, to project management and entrepreneurship. Next I started listening to targeted selections of science, history, and books on geopolitics. I was able to download a bunch of books for off-line listening, creating a 'playlist' which would auto-play while I did something else. Ultimately, I was able to learn lots of new facts, both about history in subjects I'm interested in and current events. It was the sort of quick learning I've always wanted to get from news but more meaningful subjects and well researched content. If I encountered a subject I didn't like I just deleted the book and moved on to the next one.

Granted, there were some negatives with the service. At times it felt like information overload; it was like drinking from the book digest fire hose. I would go through different books and topics so fast I felt like a lot of the details weren't sinking in. It's also Blinkist employee summaries, and I don't always agree with their takeaways or digests of the book. While there is a way to submit feedback, just emailing feedback@blinkist with the title of the book, I haven't tried the feedback submission process. That said, there isn't a rating or comments section in the app, essentially no way for users to leave feedback regarding the reviews for each other. While Blinkist boasts over 3,000 titles, almost half of the books I encountered had no audio component. In general, the summaries didn't satiate me the way books do, after a summary was done I was typically looking for more info but just went into the next, many times on a different subject. I don't think this will replace my habit of reading, but I'm excited to use this to augment my reading.

Ultimately, I learned very rapidly using this service. While I couldn't recall every fact due to the extreme learning and listening to so many book summaries, the facts and ideas I did pick up were insightful and worthwhile. I was able to use small pieces of idle time to make meaningful improvements in areas I cared about. At first I didn't think I was going to like the service, I kept finding the reasons above not to like it. But after using it for several days I was reflecting on how much I learned in such a short time. It's a type of short learning sensation that I often look for in Internet news or blogs. The source of the material is also well curated books, making the content in the "blinks" reliably high quality. But you don't have to take my word for it, there are several great reviews of Blinkist already out there. Thepowermoves shows some great pros and cons while also offering their own stellar book reviews. Satoristudio goes deep in their review, and their site also offers a %20 break on the subscription! Finally fourminutebooks breaks down the app and several, free alternatives in their review. This is something I'm going to start doing a lot more in 2020, so get ready and figure out your reading plan too!