Back to Readwise, part deux

On a previous incarnation of this blog I wrote about going back to Readwise Reader when Omnivore, my then "reader app" of choice, went under. I wasn't exactly happy with it because in a previous attempt Reader never clicked for me. Long story short, I resubscribed for a year in November and about 6 months later accidentally canceled the subscription. The folks at Readwise, being the great crew they are, ended up refunding me 6 months of service so I could subscribe again if I wanted to. After trying it again for 30 days on a 60-day trial courtesy of Craft I just subscribed again.

This isn't a cheap subscription, $120 for a year, and it's why I balked at it the second time subscribing last November. I had lots of problems with it the first time around. The other thing? The first time around I was in at the $7.99/month for a year pricing. The second time around it had gone up to $9.99/month for a year, a pretty substantial increase. Even with the refund I kept asking myself over the last month if this is something I really needed, after all I have an Inoreader subscription (another pricey subscription but still not in Readwise territory) too. Shouldn't that be good enough?

In a nutshell no it's not. Inoreader is a fine tool but the folks at Readwise are really creating a great service with both the original product that stores highlights as well as Reader. For starters Readwise (the original) can integrate with just about anything out there to either import, or export, highlights. In fact Inoreader supports export of highlights you make there to Readwise. Secondly, they're constantly working on it. They've just released a substantial update for ePub (and PDF) reading. They also are very good about fixing page capture bugs when reported.

I'm really not getting to the point here. You're probably wondering why I'd pay $120 again for a service that "didn't click with me". This time with the free trial I've been really taking the time to learn the hows and whys of the way Reader is designed and using it as designed has opened my eyes and made it a real pleasure to use. I never listened before when I read their intro emails about the purpose of the Library vs. the Feed. Now that I've been using it the way it's designed I've found real value. I also am not overloading it with stuff that I'll never catch up with.

I think the jury is still out on Reader vs. Inoreader for sheer RSS prowess. I love Inoreader for it's straightforward views that make it easy to do bulk operations. I haven't tried subscribing to a large number of things via RSS in Reader as of yet. I've been limiting it to newsletters or a couple of RSS feeds that are very much newsletters that just aren't delivered via email. That said, I won't be surprised if Reader is as good as Inoreader for how I use an RSS reader. These folks are very good at what they do.

Last but not least the parsing of web pages is now fantastic. One of the biggest problems I ran into the first time I subscribed was a huge number of parsing issues with pages I saved resulting in unreadable documents, even on pages from the same website (like Substack). Omnivore was simply better, and free, so I moved. I never saw that with the second subscription back in November so it checked one more checkbox for me. Again, huge kudos to the team for really keeping up with this.

I've resubscribed. If you want to get more from your reading I'd highly recommend doing their 30-day free trial and see if it works for you. Also check out their YouTube channel. Lots of great information there as to why you want this tool!