The world now produces more information in a single day than it did in the entire year of 2002. This flood of information can feel overwhelming. And there are too many books and too little time. How do you choose among a seemingly infinite number of books, articles, and videos? How do you get the gist of a book or find the next worth-reading book within the shortest time? Well, the goal of these best book summary websites is to make it easier to access the world's best ideas and find your next worth-reading read.
1. What is A Book Summary?
A book summary is a short overview of the main points of a book. It can significantly condense the original content and provide accurate representations of the main points of the book without personal opinion. As you know, summaries are much shorter than the original material. A general rule is that they should be no more than 10% to 15% the length of the original, and they are often even shorter than this.
2. What are the Benefits of Book Summary?
The purpose of a book summary is to quickly give the reader an idea of what this book is about, how the author developed his/her thought, and what are the key ideas that are interwoven within the text. Besides, there are a lot of benefits of a book summary.
If you are an avid reader and want to get a better sense of whether or not you should invest your time and money into the whole book. An extensive summary could help you decide if that is all you need or if you should purchase the book yourself to study the matter further.
If you read the book a long time ago, a summary can refresh your memory. So you can recall the key points without re-reading the whole book.
If you want to find some good books to read, a summary of the book saves your time in terms of poor books that you can avoid reading.
In a nutshell, people are so busy that they always want shortcuts, book summaries are such smart mechanisms that result in you deciding whether you want to really pick the book or not. Without you having to spend hours together reading the entire book, you instantly gain access to the key points by reading the summary.
3. Best 5 Book Summary websites to Get the Gist of A Book
1Blinkist
Blinkist is a non-fiction book summary service. It provides summaries of over 5,000 bestselling non-fiction books, which helps you understand books & podcasts in 15 minutes. Blinkist is perfect for curious people who love to read, busy people who don’t have time to read, and even people who aren’t into reading. For avid readers, it can help you find your next read easily and get more knowledge in less time. Given the library size and available features, Blinkist is less expensive than any existing competing book summary service.
Blinkist is available as a web app and a mobile application for both iOS and Android devices. The clean and modern design of both the web and mobile versions of the app makes it easy to learn and intuitive to use. You can also listen to the book summaries while driving, commuting, and doing housework. The highlighting feature enables storing specific snippets and retrieving the most important parts of the blinks later on.
2 Readitfor.me
Readitfor.me is the #1 book summary service for busy business leaders, helping busy business leaders maximize their most precious resource – time. It covers the most non-fiction business, leadership, marketing, personal development titles and more. All condensed into 12-minutes or less video, audio, and text summaries. So you can listen to audio form summaries anywhere, read the succinct text summaries, and download the audio to your device for offline listening.
The Readitfor.me app brings you instant, on-the-go access to the world’s best business book summaries. You can scroll through the library or filter by most popular, categories, and more. In the mobile app, read along or listen to the summary. And on the web app, you can watch videos to accompany your favorite reads.
3Shortform
Shortform claims to be the world's best book summaries. It has the world's best book summaries of bestsellers and non-fiction books, where you can learn key points and gain insights you won't find anywhere else. What makes them stand out among so many summary providers out there is that they are famous for their comprehensive, detailed book summaries. Besides, they over far more ideas than their competitors, while still being concise. Finally, they cover articles from leading publications like The New York Times, so you will get access to more great ideas.
The goal of Shortform is to spread the world's best ideas and make them easier to access. Every Shortform guide has a full audio narration. Even better, you can get PDF downloads, interactive exercises, discussion communities, and more.
4Instaread
Instaread is one of the top book summary apps on the market. It offers 15 minutes or less in-depth insights from thousands of bestselling books, available in both audio & text form.
Despite the increasing number of book summary apps, it continues to stand out from the rest. While most of the other apps only summarize nonfiction books, Instaread also covers fiction books. In addition, it provides Instaread Originals on important topics and people. The other top unique feature of the app is its cards. Cards are the quotes from a book that you can save to review later.
5getAbstract
getAbstract is the world’s biggest library of summaries. They not only provide summaries of books, but they also cover summaries of informative articles, reports, and videos, like TED talks. They transform the best nonfiction books into compelling summaries you can read or listen to in 10 minutes.
getAbstract is committed to helping the next generation of leaders succeed, aiming to give people the knowledge they need to make better decisions in their professional and personal lives. Getting the key insights from 20,000+ text and audio summaries in areas such as leadership, finance, innovation, health and science will definitely help you make better decisions in your life. And with their mobile app, you can take the life coach with you wherever you go.
Amy Lopez crafts informative articles on eBooks and eReaders, uncovering optimal methods to enhance your eBook reading experience, and eagerly shares her findings with you.
