Shiveen Pandita

My Short-Lived Experiment with Readwise and Reader

Sometime around the end of 2025, I took stock of my reading habits. Over the years, I had started spending more time on social media (bad) and less time on curated feeds (bad, again). Where I usually would end my days reading or consuming feeds or saved articles, I now found myself endlessly doomscrolling.

Considering one of my core goals of 2026 to restore balance back into my personal life, I decided to cut down on my social media consumption and fix how I consumed information about the world around me. My mainstays for the last few years had been Feedbin and Instapaper. Two fast and to the point apps, that simply do one job and do it well. Unfortunately, my queue in both of those had grown and covered the place like weeds.

I also had been recently reading a lot more non-fiction and started toying with the idea of perhaps highlighting and revisiting passages more. Up until now, I was manually pulling the highlights from my kindle using calibre and putting them in Obsidian. It wasn't the end of the world, but it was definitely a chore. I looked into Readwise and learnt that they had branched out of their niche into a fully integrated read it later app that worked for RSS feeds, saved articles and newsletters.

I wasn't a stranger to Readwise, having used it a few years back when all they offered was a Kindle sync to Roam or Evernote. I toyed with it but eventually gave up as I didn't quite find as much value then. Ironically, this time I gave up for the opposite reason, but we will get to that in a minute.

I exported out my feeds from Feedbin and saved articles from Instapaper and fed them to Readwise. I also connected my Kindle and Obsidian vault and had them linked and ready to go.

Right off the bat, I was impressed with the feature set. Readwise has a ton of features (overwhelmingly so). The way the Reader app works is that it allows you to save articles and pull in your feeds. And then everyday it will pick a few and send them to your phone or email to review. It also has a neat "later" feature which allows you to defer reading things (but might still want to) for later. Think of it as your personal adaptive daily newspaper for the things you care about. Their mobile and web apps are elite and far better than any competition I had tried, and make the experience of using it enjoyable.

On top of that, it's filled to the brim with features (these are the ones I interacted with, there might be a lot more):

However, the novelty faded real quickly. After the first few weeks of opening the app with fervor every morning and reading the daily digest emails – I slowly started feeling disillusioned with the promise. The problem wasn't that the app did not provide me with the right information, rather it was that it provided too much of it.

The problem wasn't that the app provided me with the right information, rather that it provided too much of it.

See, as much as I love reading other interesting peoples thoughts or random post-its I have collected from all over the internet, I realised I like reading them at my own pace. Readwise felt like it was a firehose aimed right at my eyeballs. Even worse, the constant vectors of notifications, push and email, with their various varieties was just stealing my attention. The reason I wanted to consolidate was to move away from social media and its constant need for attention. Instead, I ended up recreating it in Readwise.

I know I could have turned off all the notifications, and that would be that - however, even after doing that, I felt the whole interface was also designed with the aforementioned goals in mind i.e., little UI elements to draw attention on the home page. That coupled with a few papercuts in regard to the reading experience (tiny images, bad HTML parsing etc.) I decided to end the experiment after a month.

I am back to using Feedbin and Instapaper again. I missed the feel of both and how they stay out of my way and let me choose. I like that they don't clamour for attention and I also like in a weird way that they are not filled to the brim with features. I like nice, simple and boring software.

Will I miss basic Readwise kindle highlights? unequivocally, yes. That said, I have also come to realise I care less about the highlights in general and anything important I want to note, I usually note it in the moment anyway. Sometimes restoring balance means choosing less over more.

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