Mahesh Shrestha · Follow
Published in · 9 min read · Dec 21, 2018
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Update: Through September 30, Blinkist is offering the most generous deal of 2020; you can get straight 40% Blinkist discount off on first year of a Blinkist Premium subscription. Click here to claim exclusive 40% off offer with our Blinkist discount code.
Are you an avid reader? And do you feel like if you could read all of your favorite books?
Yeah, we know for avid readers, there is no best feeling than getting to read as many [favorite] books as they can.
Sadly, there’s a time constraint too, people in today’s workaholic-life have a hard time managing the time to read their lengthy favorite books! But it doesn’t have to be like this anymore. Yes, there’s the solution to this problem; an app called “BLINKIST”.
Blinkist simply serves you your craving to read your favorites books in just 15 mins. Yeah, no more sitting on a couch and lying for hours to complete just one book. Sounds amazing, right folks?
However, you might be wondering if “Is it worth paying for a Blinkist subscription?” Well, in that case, we will be covering all the bases of Blinkist in this Blinkist review so that you can speak for yourself whether you might want it or not!
Well, in short, Blinkist is an app founded in 2012 promising to serve the books’ summaries in under 15 mins of your time.
Blinkist, to make the nonfiction books summaries readable under 15 mins, has come up with the format of presenting the books called “blink books” or “book in blinks” where each blink has key insights of the book.
In the age of AI and machine learning, Blinkist still prefers humans over algorithms. Blinkist has their own team of editors that read, short and distill the books into Blinks, without compromising the quality. And that what proves how much Blinkist is quality conscious!
Blinkist has more than 2500+ nonfiction book summaries in their library, enough to get you occupied and get going.
Blinkist comes in both free and premium plans. And the premium plans come in two categories; Premium Yearly and Premium Monthly. The Premium Yearly subscription plan is billed $79.99 annually costing only $6.67 monthly, and the Premium Monthly subscription plan is billed $12.99 monthly.
Subscribing the Premium Yearly plan gives you 7-days free trial so that you can explore the Blinkist with zero risks and can opt-out the Premium subscription plan at any time.
However, the Free plans do basically offer an editor-picked book for you to read or listen daily, and nothing more!
So, with the price as much as $12.99 monthly there’s another question that arises “Is it worth paying for a Blinkist subscription?”. So, let’s look into Blinkist review details, if Blinkist is worth paying!
[And if you are suspicious whether the price for the subscription the Blinkist is asking high or not, scroll down to check head-to-head price and collection comparison of Blinkist & Blinkist Alternative.]
The price of the Blinkist premium can be as low as $6.67 and high as $12.88 monthly. That’s quite an amount of the money to pay for a service if it isn’t utilized to its potential or if it doesn’t stand up to its asking cost. But Blinkist does justify the price it is asking for the service if we look into the premium features it is offering!
Here’s the list of the premium features the Blinkist is offering:
- Unlimited access to the app: Out of more than 2500 books [and increasing], there will be no restrictions on how many titles can you access, read and listen per day. You can read and listen as many as you desire and crave.
- Hands-free Audio: Yeah, the premium plans allow you to listen to the books audio hands freely. No more of hassle.
- Highlighting: How much it hurts when you loved the sentence or lines in the book and you aren’t able to mark it for future reference? Pretty much, right? Worry no more, because Blinkist premium has a feature to highlight your ideas and bookmark them for future
- Offline Access: Offline Access is a premium feature by Blinkist that allows you to save/download the book to your personal library so that you can read or listen at any time at your ease!
- Sync across the device and Evernote: Exactly what the premium plans should offer; universal syncing, Blinkist has a feature to sync the highlights across the device and Evernote.
- Kindle Support: Kindles are the best machines to read your books on, so Blinkist understands that for sure as Blinkist lets the readers send their reads to their Kindles.
However, besides the premium features Blinkist has, it actually depends what it takes for you to consider the app if it is worth paying or not!
If any of the following behavioral things strike with you, probably, Blinkist is lot more worth paying especially for you:
- A heavy commuter: Like we already know how boring can a commute be, and it can’t always be accompanied by repeatedly playing same old, same old songs. And that’s where Blinkist comes into play to make the time and the paying worth it. You can really gain some knowledge and insights to topics you are curious about with the book summaries on Blinkist.
- Multitasker: How could it be good and awesome would it be to learn while you mow the lawn, do dishes, on the gym or other activities? If you are multitasker kind person and love to learn to utilize every bit of second, Blinkist is must-have for you.
- Synopsis-guy: Some books, despite being the #1 seller, sometimes doesn’t resonate with your type. And reading those 100-pages books just considering “#1 seller” titles can be nothing but an absolute time-killing. So, how about if you could read the perfect synopsis before you read the whole and repent later for wasting the time? — Perfect, right? Yeah, that’s where the Blinkist perfectly worth for you, saving your time before you kill it with some nonsense “#1 seller” book!
- Curious and Conversation-winner: The more curious you are, the more knowledge you gain, and the more knowledge you’ve, the more you become conversation winner. Blinkist has perfect composition and dosage of knowledge you require to win any conversation. Blinkist has blinks that have insights and information that you can use to out-wit in most of the conversations.
Blinkist, with more than 2500 titles [and newly added every week], covers almost all of the nonfiction books categories. Just a few months ago, there was a total of 19 categories, but as of now Blinkist has jumped and offers a total of 27 nonfiction books categories.
- Entrepreneurship & Small Business
- Politics
- Marketing & Sales
- Science
- Health, Fitness & Nutrition
- Personal Growth & Self-Improvement
- Economics
- History
- Communication Skills
- Corporate Culture
- Management & Leadership
- Motivation & Inspiration
- Money & Investments
- Psychology
- Productivity & Time Management
- Sex & Relationships
- Technology & the Future
- Mindfulness & Happiness
- Parenting
- Religion & Spirituality
- Creativity
- Education
- Nature & Environment
- Career & Success
- Biography & Memoir
- Philosophy
- Society & Culture
Pros:
- Less reading and More Learning
- Utilization of spare time while commuting or doing gyms.
- Audiobook summaries to listen rather than staring at the screen and reading.
- Downloadable Audiobooks
- Syncing across the devices and to Evernote
- Easy access to the bookmarks and the highlights.
- Larger collection to read from.
- Quality of blinks
- Different voices for audiobooks to choose from.
- Premium plans for the larger teams.
- Competitive subscription plans if compared to the similar Blinkist alternative.
- Responsive support
Cons:
- Losing the original vibes of hardcover paper books.
- The blinks don’t cover the summaries of some of the books, some books are good to read raw and uncut.
- The information might get overwhelming and confusing sometimes, as the blinks of similar categories might blend into each other.
- The Premium Monthly is insanely expensive [2X] when compared to the monthly charges of the Premium Yearly plans.
From the above comparison between Blinkist and Blinkist Alternative, it’s loud and clear, Blinkist is, undoubtedly, #1 book summaries service among the Blinkist alternative. Only getabstract and Soundview seem to compete with the Blinkist in the books’ collection size, but the Blinkist wins over them because of the affordable plans and pricing.
Who doesn’t love free things? — Everyone, right! We talked much and reviewed about the Blinkist. Though the subscription costs just $7 per month, which is equivalent to the 1–2 cups of coffee, it’s never sad to get something like Blinkist Premium for free.
Yeah, exactly, so how amazing would it be if you could win real Blinkist Premium for free? And no, we are not promoting unethical ways to get the Blinkist Premium free.
So, how to get Blinkist Premium free?
- Signup to Blinkist [if you are new and don’t have Blinkist account] and go to your account.
- If you are using web-version, tap on “You” and Select “Invite Friends”
- Copy the referral link and share it on your social media accounts or ask your friends to signup via your referral link.
- And for every successfully referred signup, both you and your friend get 7 days free trial.
- There is no limitation on how many friends you can refer as of now, which means you can get Blinkist Premium for as long as your new friends and family signup via your referral link.
This post itself is around 1600 words and seems like it needs a summary for itself. So, here it is the TL; DR version, or say, a summary of the review of the books summarizing product.
Blinkist is #1 books summarizing product, there is no denying. Yeah, there are some drawbacks, but it’s natural. In fact, Blinkist outdoes every other Blinkist competitor in terms of price and collection size.
For a cost of a cup of coffee [ or if you follow the above method to get Blinkist Premium Free], you get an immense collection of books you can learn from. You’ll never be bored or let go of your time unproductive when you’re commuting or standing in a queue. Your knowledge and book-reading cravings will be fulfilled.
And if you still feel like you need more in-depth Blinkist review, go ahead, scroll to the top, and start reading if Blinkist is worth paying or not!
