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Book summary apps were something of a revelation to me when I discovered them many years ago. The idea of being able to read nonfiction books quickly, skim the main points, and move on is still appealing to me.
But it seems that the same two or three suggestions constantly come up when people are making recommendations or with advertisements, so let us take a look at a few alternatives that I have found.
(1) Bookey £59.99 per year for full access to book summaries — Bookey is a great start. The price is within reach, it offers good summaries, which I would say are longer than those found on Blinkist but shorter than Shortform, so I feel like that is a good balance.
Audio narration is nice and clear if this is something you like in your book summaries, but personally, I tend to prefer actually reading them.
The nicest difference with Bookey is the nice overview they have in the form of a mind map. This breaks down the structure of the book, showing how the basic points and chapters are structured. An effective use I found for this is using it as the structure for your notes before you actually start reading or listening. Take a glance at the mind map, confirm this is something you want to read about, then list down the chapters with bullet points as headings, leaving enough room to add more details. Then off you go.
One final thing worth mentioning is the topical discussions on Bookey, which can actually earn you premium time for taking part. These are essentially discussions, debates and chats in a thread format, such as on a Reddit thread with voting and reasonable moderation and they are worth a try.
Bookey is a good alternative to the bigger book summary apps with a very good pricing model.
(2) Kobo for eBooks and audio books at fair prices — If you don’t want to get eBooks and…
