Find time to read useful books with Blinkist

But American non-fiction authors like to smear butter too thoroughly on a piece of bread, repeating the same idea 10 times. Alternating this with not always interesting and necessary stories about Ted, who fell into depression, trying to launch a startup selling cotton candy, or Mary, who, using a soldering iron, tried to expel the ghost of an introvert from her husband. It is often annoying to the point of abdominal colic.

Blinkist was created in order to filter these useful thoughts from the book through a graphomaniac sieve, making from a weighty volume the quintessence of the author's thought in an article format. Each book is compressed to the size of a small synopsis, which will take about 10 minutes to read.

The Blinkist library has over 400 useful books on a wide variety of topics - from life hacking and productivity to marketing, psychology and popular science. As a rule, these are well-known bestsellers like "7 Habits", future bestsellers, but sometimes rather strange things like a book about an alarm clock. The list of translated authors includes Jim Collins, Stephen Hawking, Tim Ferris, Robert Cialdini, Eckhart Tolle, Stephen Covey and others.

After two weeks of using Blinkist, I only found two problems.

First ☝

This is an overabundance of useful information that you physically do not have time to apply in life. I had to set a limit.

Second ☝

This is the lack of motivational pumping that the original book gives.

Therefore, it is important to understand that Blinkist is only a useful tool and does not claim to be a replacement for the original books.

Blinkist has a lot of advantages

The necessary remains, the unnecessary is eliminated. Even at the stage of reading the synopsis, you can understand whether this information is useful to you or you can safely go further.
Many of the books on the Blinkist list will never be published in Russian. Others will come out, but a couple of years after publication, like The Important Years by Mag Jay.
Saving time. Not everyone likes to lie on the couch with a weighty volume, and reading one blink'a takes from 5 to 25 minutes.
Every month the library is replenished with 20-40 new books.
Given the format, you can read a book in line for your falafel or on your way home from work.
Refresh in memory what you read. Not everyone likes to take notes, and after a while without them, some of the important information is sent straight to Valhalla.
The service has a cool design with animation a la Yahoo News, sharpened for the use of smartphones and tablets.
Possibility to improve English a little. The target language is as laconic as possible - why not the ability to read good and understandable press, while improving your knowledge of the language?

Now Blinkist has entered the stage of active development, releasing an application for Android (for iOS it was released back in January) and launching a separate site with nice author blogs.

The service library is constantly expanding (now it contains a little more than 400 books), you need to share with publishers, so the subscription to the service is paid: from $ 4, 17 to $ 7, 99 per month, depending on the plan. As the creators note, "a little more expensive than a glass of latte."

But no one forces you to pay right away. On StackSocial, they give out for three months until the end of September. It is enough to understand if you need it.

Alternatively, you can try the older one, which is slightly richer in functionality, but much more expensive.