Blinkist: Ever Read 4 Books in One Day? Now you Can!

Are you one of those people who does not like to read books because it’s very lengthy? Or do you have a lot of books to read but got no time?

Remember few days back I posted about this video chael call Fight Mediocrity. No? Check that out here.

Wondering what this has to do with Book reading & What the hell is Blinkist?

Boy, then you are going to love this post.

We have reached a point in life where attention spans are the least.

Web sites just have seconds to convince a user if their product is good or not. This fast-paced world requires a new form of leaing that is fast paced as well. Blinkist is here to help you lea faster through books, but with a twist.

Blinkist is an application for iOS and Android that takes away only the important bits from a book, summarizes it, arranges it and gives it to the user. Understandably, it is for non-fiction books. So if you are looking for the cream of the content, then this is the application for you.

Who is Blinkist for?

1. If you don’t like reading books and have a very short attention span.
2. You’ve already read a book but want a summary of the best points.
3. If you want to know about a lot of different topics without going in depth
4. If you want to start researching about a certain topic, Blinkist is a great start

Blinkist has an exhaustive list of categories to choose from which is pretty great.

So today I’m going to take an example and see the difference between the experience of reading a full book and reading the Blinkist.

Before that, you should check out this video to get an overview of What Blinkist is all about.

For this experiment, the book I’ll be comparing is Elon Musk : How the Billionaire CEO of SpaceX and Tesla is Shaping Our Future by Ashlee Vance.

I’m taking this particular book because that is the latest book I’ve read and the experience of reading the book is fresh in my memory.

• The complete book is about 421 pages long.
• The Blinkist version is about 12 pages long.

I took lesser than a month to finish the complete book and 15 minutes for the Blinkist.

Every book with Blinkist has a good summary of what the book is about and also information about the author.

My favorite part is, who should read this book?

In the section below, one might not be Interested in say Elon Musk, but maybe interested in Aerospace. The ‘Who should read this book?’ section clearly outlines that it’s also for people who are interested in Aerospace, Automotive and Solar Industries.

The Summary of all the chapters have very clear headings and give an Idea of what that section is going to contain.

And finally, the content is simple, summarized and has short sentences that cover the most important aspects.

What are the major differences between reading a book and using Blinkist?

1. Blinkist is not for books that have a bit of an Inspiration. Summaries of biographies take the essence and inspiration out of the book.
2. Some business books especially those that teach something, get repetitive because they want to hammer the idea into your head. With Blinkist, you get a superficial Idea of the content.
3. The Impact of a book will not last long with Blinkist, unless you take action of Implementing what you’ve leat.
4. It’s a great way to be knowledgeable and have small insights into different topics
5. It is great for non-emotion based books. Books on marketing tips and strategies would be good through Blinkist
6. Blinkist is a good idea for topics that you have no idea of. It could be the gateway app for leaing more about a particular topic.
7. It’s not good for getting in-depth into a topic.
8. It is great for getting a good perspective on a topic because you can read close to 3 to 4 books within a day.

Blinkist Plus and Premium

The upgraded version of Blinkist gives you access to over 1,500 blinks(A book in a Blinkist version is called a blink) a month with over 40 titles.

The Premium version also lets you get audio version of all your blinks, as well as offline access. The premium version also offers the highlighting feature, where you can highlight the important points and it gets stored in your Eveote, where you can probably take action!

Download Blinkist for iOS || Download Blinkist for Android (Read all books free for first 3 days)

Has any of you used Blinkist, if so what do you think of it? Do you know of any similar smartphone apps? Let me know in the comment section below.

To read next: The Science Of Speed Reading & How To Read Faster & Save Time