Readwise takes on Amazon’s Kindle and Goodreads with its new app for book lovers - TechCrunch
By Google News Technology ·
Readwise, the maker of a read-it-later app and digital reading companion that keeps track of your highlights across services, is now taking on Amazon’s e-book empire with its latest app, Readwise Books. The app is an e-book store and helps you track what you’ve read, similar to Amazon’s Goodreads.
The bootstrapped startup described the new app as “a cross between Kindle and the Goodreads apps,” as it offers a single place to buy, read, and track books. However, Readwise Books aims to offer more detailed reading stats than the dates you read a book and whether you finished it. It lets readers visualize richer reading data like words read, pace, depth, immersion, and sessions.
Meanwhile, its new store offers “millions” of e-books from the big five publishers and others, initially in the U.S., with more countries to come. Print books (fulfilled by Bookshop.org’s distributor) and some audiobooks are available as well, the company notes.
The launch comes at a time when there’s been an explosion of new reading apps and book trackers, all hoping to challenge Goodreads by introducing new features like book clubs, widgets, improved discovery features, goal-setting, better lists and organizational tools, habit-tracking, and more. However, few indie developers have gone so far as to launch an alternative to Amazon’s Kindle e-books store, which remains the industry leader, with an 83% share of the market when Kindle+ (formerly Kindle Unlimited) is included in the stats.
One of Kindle’s bigger advantages is that it offers an end-to-end solution for everything related to reading e-books, from the hardware devices to the book-tracking log. Readwise isn’t selling its own e-readers, but it is attempting to create its own community around reading, complete with tools for reading…
Originally published by Google News Technology