Can books be saved?
*Introducing Readwise Books *
By most measures, book reading is in steep decline. Reading for pleasure has dropped by 40% since 2004[0]. And teenagers are proverbially cooked[1], in no small part due to the rise of AI[2]. The future of books feels grim…
…which is why we (secretly) spent the past two years doing something insane: trying to build the first viable, independent alternative to Kindle ever.
Backing up a bit, Readwise’s mission is to improve the practice of reading by an order of magnitude. We believe better reading technology can actually save books, and reverse these trends.
Unfortunately, it’s not enough to just build the better software. Innovation on ebooks is structurally constrained by the fact that there are fewer than 10 companies in the US with the rights to sell all major ebooks/audiobooks, and it’s incredibly hard to get those rights.
No reader is going to join a new book reading platform where they can’t find and read all the books they want to read.
That brings me to today’s news: We built Readwise Books: our very own ebook store and app. In simple terms, you can think of it as a cross between the Kindle and Goodreads apps, where you can buy, read, and track books.
And perhaps most importantly, we have distribution deals with all 5 of the “Big 5” publishers (and then some), meaning you can find, buy, and read almost any book you’re looking for. As far as we know, we are the first truly independent, digital-first challenger to have ever done this.
Readwise Books
OK, you might say, that’s great and all, but why would I switch from Kindle?
There are many reasons, but to put it simply, Readwise Books makes reading books more enjoyable, more active, and more legible. It’s like the Strava of Books.
It’s easier to hear from some of our alpha users who have been helping to test it for the past year:
"This app has cured me from my reading slump, it's so addicting!" - Kiley
"I can't believe I'm saying this as a physical copy girly but I LOVED IT. I think I read 2x faster than I usually do." - Gillian
"I have been really enjoying the app, it has really helped me replace doom scrolling." - Jon
"My friends have been eating this up!! I've never seen them read so viciously before." - Wil
It’s still early, and there’s so much for us to do, but we think we’ve landed on a feature set that gets folks excited to read, and read more!
There’s a lot to Readwise Books, but here’s a quick overview of the features:
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A one-stop shop for reading and tracking. The foundation of the app is a unified experience where you can not only read purchased or uploaded ebooks like Apple Books, but also track them like Goodreads, all in one place.
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The Strava of reading. The core innovation in Readwise Books is a new dimension of tracking your reading on the word and “session” levels, automatically. You can think of this like tracking a run, a workout, or your sleep (making your words read legible, the same way an apple watch makes your daily steps legible).
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A novel social experience. The session innovation also sets up a light social component that's designed to feel less like a new social network and more like reading a book in your favorite coffee shop or library.
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Optimized for Android e-readers. While ebooks offer many advantages over print books, many readers simply do not wish to read on their phones. Fortunately, a new generation of Android-based e-ink devices has emerged in the past few years, and Readwise Books is designed to run seamlessly on those out of the box (shout out @daylightco).
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Fully loaded. Readwise Books is chock-full of powerful features including an elevated reading experience, best-in-class highlighting & note-taking, third-party integrations, manual session tracking for reading outside the app, a public API and MCP server for your agents, text-to-speech and LLM-powered features for uploaded ebooks, manual tracking for paper books, and a tight integration with the broader Readwise ecosystem.
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Constant improvement from a small, nimble team who loves books. We love building reading software, you can expect the platform to continuously evolve from here.
As of today’s announcement, Readwise Books is now in private beta! If you’re an existing Readwise customer you already have **early access** and can get going -- we’d love any and all feedback you have!
If you’re a reader (but not a Readwise customer), you can hop on the waitlist here or grab an invite code from another user. We plan to scale the beta rapidly and launch publicly before the end of the year.
When launched, the core of the product (tracking and reading) will be free forever :)
That’s the core of the announcement, but you can read on if you want a little more background on how we got here or check out the even more in-depth post on our blog if you want to go deep on our product philosophy…
Since starting Readwise 9 years ago, an ebook platform has always been our north star. Internally we’ve had a master plan that goes something like:
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Go deep on reading retention with our first product, Readwise Highlights[3]
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Use the proceeds from above to move into the read-later space, our second product Readwise Reader[3]
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Use the above to build a better way to read books, in an app anyone can find any book they want… and genuinely improve reading. Readwise Books.
We never would have imagined that it would take so long to get here. Candidly, it was much harder than we thought it would be, and has come at huge personal cost and risk (maybe a story for another time). It's the culmination of years of effort and investment for our team, investing our profits as a bootstrapped company.
None of the big tech or big book incumbents seem to care about ebooks any more, and there hasn't been any real innovation in years. To answer the question in the title of this post (somewhat obviously): yes, we believe books can be saved, and we believe someone has to do it.
The feedback from our alpha testers has been encouraging: 48,000+ hours read in the app, thousands of books finished, with many folks reading for 10+ hours a week in Readwise Books. We hope you feel the same way when you get to try it.
What do you think a book platform should do in 2026? How should it work? What is missing, and where should we take Books? Are we insane? Do you think we can actually switch readers from the incumbent big tech companies, or are we doomed? Where will books go in the next decade?
I’d love to hear what you think :)
- Tristan
[0] Decline of reading for pleasure: https://www.cell.com/iscience/fulltext/S2589-0042(25)01549-4
[1] Decline of teen reading: https://www.ft.com/content/a8016c64-63b7-458b-a371-e0e1c54a13fc
[2] @tferriss has written cogently about AI eating nonfiction: https://tim.blog/2026/06/12/has-ai-already-killed-nonfiction/
[3] For existing Readwise users: rest assured that we remain incredibly focused on making sure that our existing products (Highlights and Reader) continue to improve. Just this year, we've shipped a huge modernization of the mobile app (with the web app update coming soon) to Highlights, and much higher quality voices, mobile chat, global Ghostreader, reading themes to Reader… and hundreds of other improvements and fixes. There's much more to come on both, and indeed we see the pace of improvement there accelerating!
