Blinkist: My Personal Review after 1,5 Years of Using it
Blinkist wants to be a modern and intelligent alternative to learning through books. Here is my experience report after more than 1.5 years
I love books. Do you? Cool, but I have to admit I have a little problem with them: They’re usually not all that cheap, at least not considering the fact that they only provide employment for a few weeks.
And what if you bought a book that you don’t like at all in terms of content? Then you have invested not only time but also money, but you actually wish you hadn’t.
And speaking of bad books — until you can clearly say whether the book really fills the purpose or the knowledge gap, you often have to fight your way through pages of introductions, pass frequent examples and so the knowledge you want to take in, goes and goes through the whole book…
If you have read the book, even learned something, you unfortunately forget it after a few days anyway — markings in the book itself are no solution, because then you would still have to open the book again and again at the right place.
Moreover, many books are not so handy that you can just take all your knowledge with you wherever you go.
Blinkist wants to find a solution for all these problems. And in this article I give you my opinion about this app, after using it intensively for 1.5 years and completing over 100 books with it (you can actually get done even more).
How Blinkist wants to help out
Blinkist is a smartphone app, or a web app that you can use with an subscription model for 13.99€ (about $14.50) per month.
It offers summaries of non-fiction books from various categories, by various authors.
The summaries are available in audio format, i.e. as audio book, but also in text form. The speaker reads out the text, which can also be viewed.
Most books can be worked through in 10–20 minutes and their most important contents consumed.
The summaries are really only summaries, not the opinion of the providers or that of anyone else, the content is taken directly from the original book.
Let’s have a look on the features Blinkist offers
What would be a review of an app if I did not show you the app?
The library
All your books whose summaries you want to listen to or read through are stored in your library, where they are also available offline.
All titles are divided into so-called “Blinks”, which always contain about 2 minutes of content and a core statement.
So each summary is divided into small chunks and your progress can be seen directly in the library.
Read or listen to the summary of your choice — or even both
As already mentioned, you can either listen to the summary yourself, which is also available as text, or you can have a speaker read it to you, to which I must say that most of the voices are very easy to understand and very pleasant. The audio quality is also very high, not as bad as Audible often is.
As you can see you can also directly mark highlights in the texts, I will show you this feature next.
Your knowledge-highlights in one place
Whenever you mark something in a title, it is automatically saved in your highlights, where you can then review all important learnings from all titles at any time.
Of course the highlights are also visible again when you read the book again, they simply appear highlighted in the text.
Find any book available from your favorite authors
What would an app like Blinkist be if there was no search function? Of course you can easily search for individual books or authors.
Yes, one of the books has a German title, because as already mentioned, Blinkist is only available in German and English so far. But you can choose to receive only German or only English suggestions, or both, as I have set it, since I speak both German and English.
The books marked on the right are already in your library.
Discover new topics you might find interesting
Blinkist offers books on all kinds of topics, as long as they are non-fiction. So you can find something for different topics and find it listed in the categories page.
Here only a small selection of categories:
- Psychology
- Technology
- Marketing and Sales
- History & Politics
- Autobiographies
- Economy, Finance and Investment
- Love and Sex
- Communication
- Productivity
Everything in under 20 minutes
On the start page of each title you will find how many blinks it is divided into and how long it takes to listen / read it.
Underneath there is a small summary of the content, but it is not shown on the picture.
My personal conclusion
Swallowing books as quickly and effectively as possible in under 20 minutes? Is Blinkist maybe only something for self-optimization fanatics?
Definitely not.
As already mentioned, there are the most diverse categories in which many things have nothing to do with productivity or self-optimization at all. Especially if you’re just looking for titles on a small topic, I wouldn’t advise you to use Blinkist, because there’s not a huge selection of titles on every topic.
I think it’s ideal for anyone who enjoys discovering something new and Blinkist has a lot to offer with the new titles coming out all the time.
So I think Blinkist is ideal for anyone who is not only interested in a topic and who is willing to consume at least 3–5 books a month at Blinkist. If you consume at most one book a month at Blinkist, you can save the money, you don’t seem to use the app properly anyway and could have spent the money on a real book.
If you have now decided to take a closer look at Blinkist, here is a link below to test it for free. If you sign up via this link, I get a small compensation, but of course you don’t pay a cent more. Have fun & share your experience with me!
A few recommendations and tips
Must listen or must reads available in Blinkist
- Rich Dad Poor Dad
- 12 Rules for Life
- Misbehaving
- Talk like TED
- Unlimited Power
- The 10X Rule
- The ONE Thing
- Outliers
Tips for using Blinkist
Listen to something interesting before falling asleep.
This soothes and helps you to fall asleep and with a duration of about 10–15 minutes you can create a whole book in the evening, filled with knowledge, which becomes especially firm during sleep.
Use the possibility to mark highlights.
So actively mark in books, places you find especially important to remember. But most of all you should go through your highlights every now and then to refresh your knowledge.
Why don’t you use it to bridge “dead” time
When cooking, driving a car, on the treadmill or just when you have a short time, you can use it with Blinkist to learn something new in 2–3 minutes through one or maybe even several blinks.
