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In this fast-paced society, it is becoming difficult to read a book from cover to cover. Yet there are hundreds of books getting published on daily basis. With work, the office, and education, people have very little free time left. On top of all that our mobiles alone are enough to distract us from reading books. With this in mind, a new trend of book summary apps started to emerge. Although people might have mixed feelings, these book summary apps take their part in our daily lives very quickly. Because these apps offer the key summary and takeaways from non-fictional books in 15 to 20 minutes. And (in my opinion) they are doing a very good job.
Although these book summary apps cannot replace good old paperbacks, they still offer very useful and effective service. Blinkist and Headway are the two book summary apps that I personally used and still using. So in this blog post, I would like to share my experience with these two platforms and offer my personal choice. Just keep in mind that there are lots of other book summary apps out there, but in this blog post, I will focus on Blinkist and Headway.
Blinkist book summary app
Blinkist is one of the most popular book summary apps that help you stay up to date with non-fiction books by providing high-quality summaries of books. Blinkist has over 18 million users worldwide and is available on many different platforms and devices. It shares the biggest ideas from bestselling non-fiction books and shares those ideas in either text or audio format. So far Blinkist summarized over 4500 non-fiction books and that number is growing every day. Blinkist is totally free to download and get started with, but if you want full membership then you can purchase a monthly or yearly subscription. Like most services nowadays, paid version delivers better service with improved members-only features.
You deserve to know all the valuable stuff out there and Blinkist can help you achieve it with their premium Blinkist subscription. You’ll have unlimited access to reading summaries as well as other cool features- like offline listening, custom themes, and their Shorcasts. These are podcasts that are specific to books and they provide even more insights and add value to the summaries
Headway book summary app
Just like any book summary app, Headway aims to deliver quality summaries from best-selling non-fiction books in 15 minutes. Headway is a well-designed app that provides content and knowledge to the user in an exciting and stimulating way. Headway summarizes non-fiction books with bitesize insights, covering the major ideas of each title in short paragraphs.
Blinkist Vs Headway
Let’s dive into looking at both Blinkist and Headway and find out which one of these book summary apps would be a good choice to read summaries of non-fiction books.
Blinkist vs Headway – Selection of books
Blinkist has a great selection of summaries and there is something for everyone. Popular non-fiction titles are available and the library contains over 4500 summaries in total. On the other hand Headway’s library is not as big as Blinkist’s. But they have a good selection of summaries of best-selling books.
Result – Blinkist
Blinkist vs Headway – Usability
I think when it comes to usability, both apps are easy to use and offer really good navigation. They both offer an audio version of the available titles. But when it comes to audio, some Blinkist titles are more suitable for listening. On the other hand Headway’s audio version of the summaries are more like audiobooks, where the content is read to you as it appears in the text. But Headway offers a feature, where you can create cards with important points. Then you can use these cards for Spaced Repetition to learn these points later on. I also like Headways weekly and monthly challenges that encourage you to read topics to help you grow.
Result – Headway, because I like challenges and cards that help you to remember concepts and ideas.
Blinkist vs Headway – Quality of Book Summaries
With this, I will go with Blinkist. Because I felt like the summaries from Headway are more like snippets from the original books. On the other hand, Blinkist presents the ideas from the books with examples and they are clearer about key ideas in the books.
Blinkist vs Headway – The Best Price
Blinkist offers two different types of subscriptions. One is Premium monthly and the other one is Premium yearly. Of course, the yearly plan cost around 50% less than a monthly subscription. However, if you decide the cancel your subscription, you won’t get your money back with the yearly subscription. With the monthly subscription, you have an option to cancel anytime. Having said that if you planning to use Blinkist for at least 5 months, a yearly subscription will be the best option.
Headway offers 3 different subscription packages. They are 1 month, 3 months, or 6 months. Headway’s monthly package is more expensive than Blinkist and it is $19.99, around $5 dollars more than Blinkist. However, when you subscribe for 3 months package, that price comes down to $9.99. This is $5 dollars cheaper than Blinkist’s monthly price, but a couple of dollars more than Blinkist’s yearly plan. But the 6 months package is probably the one that beats Blinkist. It costs $39.99 and that works out as $6 per month.
Result – Headway
Final Say – Blinkist vs Headway comparison result
So in my opinion, Blinkist is the clear winner here. Not only because they have more book summaries, but they also update those summaries regularly. They improve the audio version of the summaries, so they are more suitable for listening while you are on the go.
As mentioned before, this is my own personal choice. Both Headway and Blinkist offer free trials. You can try both of them and decide for yourself.