Thought Shrapnel

I received Craig Mod’s most recent newsletter in which he referenced a previous issue from last year. In that prior issue, he talked about ‘digital reading in 2024’ in which I mostly focused on his discussion of the mobile phone-size BOOX Palma e-ink tablet.

However, he also talked about a company called Readwise which he advises. They’ve got a product, “a fabulous long form reading, meta-data-editing, article-organizing platform called Reader” which I’ve been experimenting with today. My workflow is usually based on Pocket, but it feels a bit disorganised and out-of-date in 2025. Reader has features such as the ability to highlight and import anything from the web, automatic article summaries, PDF import, all while also acting as a feed reader and somewhere you can send newsletters.

I have no affiliation, but it’s impressed me today. While Craig Mod likes his BOOX Palma, I prefer my full-size BOOX Note Air 2 e-ink tablet and Google Pixel Fold. Both are Android-based, and so both will be perfect for the Reader app. I’ll perhaps follow-up when I’ve got my workflow more set up. (It’s $9.99/month once my month-long free trial finishes, but I should be able to get 50% off as a student!)

The Readwise Reader app imports long form articles with aplomb. Parses them almost always perfectly, and paginates fabulously. It also OCRs non-insanely-typeset PDFs into device-sized typographic goodness.

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Some things I adore about Readwise Reader: Solid typography, excellent pagination (seriously, I love how they paginate articles — vertically, sensibly, for easy highlighting across page boundaries), being able to double-tap on a paragraph to highlight the whole thing (much easier than fiddling with sentence highlights, and often you want paragraph context anyway), and built in “ghost reader” functions which provide LLM-based summaries (useful to quickly remember why you saved a particular article) and also LLM-based dictionary / encyclopedia definitions (which have so far been pretty good? although I’d love to be able to load my own dictionaries into the system). I also love that Reader’s web app feels like a kind of “control center” that allows for easy editing of article metadata and more. Install the Obsidian plugin, and you have a full repository of reading history and notes, in Markdown, on your local machine. Reader also has Chrome / Safari plugins that make for one-tap adding to your article Inbox. If you copy a URL and open the Reader App, it’ll automagically ask if you want to add that article to your queue. Lots of nice affordances.

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Readwise, too, is an interesting company. Bootstrapped. No breathless whispering of Mark Andreessen across some gilded dinner table. Just a real company making real money by selling useful services around reading. What a thing!

Source: Roden