I love books. While I embrace the digital revolution, I still read good old fashioned printed on paper books. At any one time I will be reading something for fun (Wonder by RJ Palacio) and something that I can learn (4 Hour Workweek by T. Ferris). That was until I discovered Blinkist. An app that summarises your favourite books. Last Thursday night I read Creativity Inc, what did you do?
Challenge: you want the knowledge but don’t have the time, you would like to improve your dinner party talk, non fiction appeals to you or you’re just curious.
Solution: Blinkist takes a popular non fiction book and summarises it for you. What would usually take a few days to get through, now only takes about 18 minutes. Since discovering the app, I have learned about networking, management and economics. When you first sign up you get 3 days of unlimited access. This means that you can read any book, make notes and sync it with Evernote (the Evernote sync is only available with a premium subscription). You also gain access to the audio books.
Once this ends you can either stay on as a free memeber, where you get access to one book a day which is chosen for you, or you could become a paying member, of which there are two options. Blinkist Plus gives you unlimited access to all of the books for only R42 a month or about R500 a year (the app accepts yearly payments only but shall have a monthly payment option available in the future). Blinkist Premium gives you what the cheaper Plus does as well as access to the audio books, and the option to send to your Kindle. This option goes for R67 a month or about R800 for a year. Considering the price of books, this is pretty good value for money.
New titles are constantly being added and you can suggest which titles you would like to be added to the Blinkest library. For example this weekend, one of the releases is Think Like Zuck by Ekaterina Walter, which explores the successes of Facebook and how you can emulate them.
Price: free (one book a day), R42 a month (access to all books), and R67 a month (access to books and audiobooks).
Get it: https://www.blinkist.com/
Data: not bad and best of all these books are available offline.
Disclaimer: Jade purchased this app with for herself with her own money.
