Every one of the 286 books on this site got here through Readwise. So did every quotation on every one of those pages. If you want to know whether I rate it, that is probably answer enough.
What it actually does
You read. You highlight. Then, in the ordinary course of things, you never see that highlight again — it sits in a Kindle you have moved on from, or a book on a shelf, or an article you cannot now name.
Readwise collects all of it into one place. Kindle syncs automatically. Apple Books, Instapaper, Pocket, articles, podcasts, even paper books — you photograph the page and it lifts the text off it. Everything you have ever marked as worth keeping, in one searchable pile.
And then it does the part that matters: every morning it sends a handful of those highlights back to you. Not the ones you saved last week. Ones from years ago, chosen so that the things you half-remember come round again before you have lost them entirely.
Nearly six years, every day
I have done that daily review every day since I started.
Five minutes a morning. It is the single highest-return habit I have, and I say that as someone who has tried most of them. Ideas I read in 2020 keep arriving at the moment I need them. Arguments I had forgotten resurface and change my mind a second time. Books I would have sworn I remembered turn out to be full of things I did not.
The compounding is the point. A book you read once and never revisit is mostly gone within a year. A book you read once and then meet ten more times, in fragments, over five years, becomes part of how you think.
