The Ultimate Blinkist Review 2020: Is It Worth the Money?

☑︎ this review has been last updated in August 2020

Good news everyone! Now you can also watch our in-depth Blinkist review as a video – on YouTube or right here inside this article.

(note that the rest of this article contains much more information than the clip – i.e. you can consider this as a “video blink” for our review)

One last thing before we dive in: for those who do decide to try Blinkist, we’re glad to announce an exclusive 20% discount for our visitors. The step-by-step instructions can be found at the end of this guide.

For starters, the most crucial question to answer is this one:

Why Should I Even Consider Using Blinkist?

Simply speaking, there’s just too many books and too little time. Countless other stimuli are competing for your attention every day, every hour and every minute!

To make it worse, the numbers of newly published books have been growing so rapidly in the last decades that some have called it a “book explosion”:

Source: ourworldindata.org/books

With thousands of fresh titles being written every year – and still the same-old 24 hours in a day, how do you keep up with a constantly growing reading list?!

This is where Blinkist comes in – by offering easy-to-digest versions of popular books, it helps you to better navigate the ever-expanding ocean of human knowledge and wisdom.

In this in-depth review, we will look at Blinkist from all possible angles, based on our 36-month testing period – with the goal of answering the following questions:

• 💰Is It Worth Paying for a Blinkist subscription?
• 🏆Are there any alternatives that are better?
• 📚Is Blinkist a substitute for reading full books?
• ⚡How to use Blinkist in the most effective manner?

By the end of this guide, you will be armed with all the information you need to make a decision on whether to go for a Blinkist Premium subscription, and how to use it to efficiently to read dozens of books each month. Let’s get to it!

So What Is Blinkist, Exactly?

How does Blinkist work?

To put it simply, Blinkist is a non-fiction book summary service. There are thousands of book abstracts, or blinks, in the Blinkist library, and new titles are being added all the time.

Each blink is structured as a self-contained mini narrative that can be read (or listened to) in about 15 minutes.

The blinks are subdivided into sections for better comprehension, beginning with an intro, which gives an idea of what the book is about and “what’s in it for the reader” 💎 – and ending with a summary of the book’s key thoughts as well as pieces of actionable advice.

To sum up, here are the 3 key things that you should know about blinks:

Being the provider of bite-sized morsels of knowledge, Blinkist really makes sure the summaries are available in just about any situation by providing several ways to access the content: via a browser-based online service, a mobile app, or even a direct Kindle link. We will review each of the ways of using Blinkist below:

Blinkist Mobile App

The Blinkist interface you’ll be using the most is its mobile app, because it covers the (arguably) most popular use case of Blinkist. And that’s reading or listening to blinks on the go – while commuting, walking, or just waiting for a friend to show up in a café.

The app is available in Android and iOS versions; the interface is subdivided into four areas available from the bottom tabs: Discover, Library, Activity, and Profile. The most useful of them is the Library, which lists the blinks you’ve saved into your personal collection.

There are filters which allow showing or hiding the blinks according to their state (not started, in progress, finished), with the reading progress being conveniently hinted by a subtly coloured background bar on each item.

The reading interface is minimalist and distraction-free: the only buttons visible are “back”, “audio”, and “text size”, and even they can be hidden by simply tapping the main text. Swiping right or left flips the page, and the green progress bar at the bottom of the screen unobtrusively indicates the current position in the blink.

Having used Blinkist for more than 2 years, we can definitely conclude that one of the most useful features of the Blinkist app is the audio versions of the blinks, which allow ingesting them while keeping your eyes and your hands free for other activities – ideal for walking, commuting, jogging, hiking, etc.

You can even click on the icon with earphones and a down arrow next to a blink in your library to download the audio version to your device’s internal storage; and be able to listen to it offline – quite useful for flights or times off the grid.

After testing the audio feature extensively during several months, we can characterize its overall quality as moderate to high: the speakers have varying but mostly non-irritating voices, the above mentioned variation actually helps in not getting bored from listening to the same person over and over again. In terms of technical implementation, there are very few hiccups, and the issue rate has been declining over time.

Speaking of the latter, the most common issue that has been spotted so far is the freezing of sound during the transition from one part of a blink to the next – this can sometimes happen on a weak data connection or after unexpectedly losing connectivity. Restarting the app solves such problem in all observed cases.

It should be noted that the audio is not included in the free version of Blinkist, i.e. it is only available in the Premium subscription plan – more on that later.

Blinkist Web Service

Once you create an account with Blinkist, you gain access to an online profile which also contains your personal library, allowing you to read or listen to blinks from your laptop or desktop computer. It has two separate tabs for ongoing and finished reading, where each item is simply a link to the blink with a handy progress indicator at the bottom:

Just like the app, the in-browser reading interface has been designed in minimalist style, with every detail aimed at contributing to a distraction-free reading experience.

The entire menu has been removed in favour of three buttons: the home link (leads back to your library), the contents button which open a slide-in overlay with the structure of the current blink, as well as the font size control. Not much, but in reality, that’s all you need to focus entirely on the abstract at hand.

The web service is of course synchronized automatically with the Blinkist mobile app, which allows you to seamlessly continue reading across all your devices.

Overall, the browser version of Blinkist is as distraction-free and easy to use as the mobile app, yet based on over 24 months of testing it has been used much less often than the app. This is probably due to the fact that you can’t do much else on a hands-free smartphone (apart from listening to music), but there are many more things on the web that compete for your attention.

Now that we’ve looked at the Blinkist offering, let’s discuss the pricing and see if it’s worth moving to a paid subscription:

How Much Does Blinkist Cost?

The service is built on a freemium model, which means there are both a free version (without an expiration term) as well as paid versions. The former gives you access to one blink per day; the blink is selected automatically, i.e. you don’t get to decide which ones you can read.

At a cost of $99.99 per year (which can be reduced to $79.99 per year for the first year using our exclusive 20% discount), you’ll be able to read any number of blinks at any time you like, as well as unlock audio versions and useful extras such as passage highlighting (useful for remembering the most interesting places in the blinks you read and getting back to them later).

While useful for acquainting yourself with the service, the free version does not function well as a long-term solution for those who want to read specific blinks. For full access to the entire library of over 3000 book abstracts, you’ll need to get the Premium version.

Apart from that, our main reason for staying with the Premium plan are audio versions of summaries: as mentioned in the previous section, we’ve found that listening to blinks on a hands-free phone is the most convenient way of adding some more useful reading time to your day.

The Premium version also allows storing the blinks locally on your mobile device and reading them without an Internet connection, which is ideal for flights and other transportation modes with low or no network availability.

In addition to that, you will be able to store audio blinks on your smartphone or tablet for offline listening as well as sync your highlights with your Evernote account and send blinks directly to your Kindle for a more eyesight-friendly reading experience.

Is It Easy to Cancel?

In order to be called truly user-friendly, a service also needs to offer an easy and clear procedure for cancelling an existing paid account. While preparing for this review, we’ve tried stopping a Blinkist Premium subscription in various ways, and the most important takeaway is that your cancellation options depend on the platform you’ve used to subscribe in the first place:

if you’ve purchased your Premium via their website, you can click on “You — Settings” in the top right corner of the Blinkist web interface, and then click on “Cancel subscription” in your “Account” tab. Quite straightforward!

If you’ve subscribed via an Android smartphone, the Premium plan, just like pretty much any other thing you buy on an Android, will be stored in the Play app – so you’ll need to unsubscribe there: just click on the three-line menu button in the top left corner of your Play app, and then go to “Account – Subscriptions” in the drop-down menu.

If you’re using an iPhone instead, you’ll need to go to the “Settings” app, click on “iTunes and App Store”, select your Apple ID, and click on “View Apple ID”. In both cases, you will be presented with a list of your active subscriptions; just locate Blinkist Premium among them and click on “Cancel”.

In case of any difficulties with the paid plan it is highly recommended to approach Blinkist’s support team – they’re quick to reply and always friendly.

Now that that’s settled, let’s head over to the next stage of our review, where we bring together all the pros and cons of Blinkist in order to make a more informed final decision –

Pros and Cons

In this section we will summarize the advantages of using Blinkist as well as point out certain areas for improvement:

• Access to condensed summaries of the best non-fiction books gives the opportunity to absorb maximum knowledge and wisdom, flexibly and quickly.
• Blinks are subdivided into logical sections and feature short summaries (“a blink of a blink”) for maximum comprehension.
• Web interface as well as mobile apps for both Android and iOS devices. Possibility to sync the personal blink library into a Kindle.
• Less expensive than any existing competing service of book abstracts, given the library size and available features.
• Useful for pre-selecting the books for reading in full as well as acquainting yourself with new ideas, concepts, and facts. Can be synced with an Evernote account.
• Possibility to send feedback on existing blinks regarding both style/grammar as well as content.
• The audio version of the content allows for distraction-free absorption of the abstracts while reducing eye strain.
• The highlighting feature enables storing specific snippets and retrieving the most important parts of the blinks later on.
• Possibility to store text and audio versions of blinks in local memory and reading/listening to them later on, regardless of Internet availability.
• Clean and modern design of both the web and mobile versions of the app; the interface is easy to learn and intuitive to use.

• While using the mobile app, the library might sometimes need to be refreshed manually (by holding and pulling down on the screen) to stay current with the blinks added from the web interface.
• Audio can freeze on rare occasions when transitioning from one part of a blink to the next, observed during poor connectivity of the host device.
• It is not yet possible to recommend the blinks you read to other people who use Blinkist directly from within the app (need to share a link instead).

Blinkist for Teams

The company has recently unveiled a new offering, which is in practice an additional pricing plan: Blinkist for Teams. It works exactly as you’d expect – a bulk subscription option for 10+ people, each getting all the features of Blinkist Premium at a discount.

The latter depends on the number of user accounts you purchase and ranges from 32% ($549 for 10 people, or $54.9 per person per year) to 50% ($1999 for 50 people, or $39.99 per person per year). In order to obtain custom pricing for larger teams you will need to contact Blinkist directly.

A slider like this lets you choose the pricing for the team version of Blinkist.

Apart from the hefty discount, the main benefits of giving your entire team access to a library of condensed non-fiction bestsellers are better mutual understanding due to multi-disciplinary new knowledge and insights, as well as tighter bonding because of all the additional shared subjects to discuss and books to experience.

Notable Competitors: Better Than Blinkist?

As with any other web service, it would be odd if Blinkist was alone in its niche – indeed, you can read book summaries in other places as well, including specialized apps. Among the closest competitors, it is worth mentioning getAbstract and Instaread, with the former being the most comprehensive alternative as far as the feature set goes.

While Blinkist is not the only non-fiction book abstract service in existence, there are certain important features that help it differentiate from competing offers. Let’s dive into more detail and see how each of them stacks up against Blinkist:

In order to visualize the differences in the key parameters of Blinkist and its competitors, such as price points and the size of the library of summaries, we’ve compiled this table:

	Cheapest plan	Plan with audio	Collection size
	$99.99	$99.99	3000+
	$59.00	$115.00	5000+
	$89.99	$89.99	700+
	$69.30	$69.30	200+
	$39.99	$39.99	150+
	$99.99	$99.99	2000+

The above data suggests that Blinkist not only offers more attractive pricing compared to its major competitors, but also looks good when we take into account the library size: its value for money becomes even higher when we include the interface and features into the picture.

Common Misconceptions About Blinkist

Now that we’ve examined the competitive landscape, it’s time to bust some myths! Below we’ve collected the most common misconceptions about Blinkist:

• Myth #1: It’s hard to cancel a Blinkist subscription. We’ve seen some complaints from users about Blinkist automatically billing their cards at the start of new billing cycles (you can check out the comments section below for examples). While this is a completely logical behavior from a subscription service (by definition, in fact), we did investigate the cancellation process after that, and added a separate section to this guide. Check it out for more details!
• Myth #2: Blinkist is spelled with a second “L”. This one is quite understandable, because the word “BlinkList” does arguably make more sense. It gets even more confusing after you find out that there in fact was a completely unrelated website with that exact name. That website hasn’t been updated since 2017 and so can now be considered defunct; this means neither “BlinkList” nor “BlinkEst” nor “Blikist” are the correct way to spell the name of the book summary service we are discussing in this review :)
• Myth #3: Blinkist is a substitute to reading full books. A lot of criticism about Blinkist revolves around directly comparing blinks to books. It might be argued though that substituting normal reading was never the goal of Blinkist; in fact, it works even better when you combine it with full book reading. By the way, this is exactly what we’re going to discuss in the next section:

Using Blinkist Effectively

The most important thing to understand with respect to Blinkist is that it is by no means incompatible with reading full books: while it does help eliminate some reading of that type, as we’ll see below, the real power of Blinkist can be unlocked when actually combining it with reading full titles. Let’s look at some ways it can be done:

📚 Pre-selecting books: there are countless books out there, and only so much time in each day; this means you will have to be rather picky with what you read if you want to maximize your reading value. Here’s where Blinkist comes in handy – by going through the blinks you can filter out some of the books that aren’t going to be worth your while for various reasons (e.g. too few new ideas, weak arguments, irrelevant or simply uninteresting to you). This can help save massive amounts of money (and time) by helping you pay only for those books which are truly worth it. See the next section of this review for some figures to support this idea.

🔍 Pre-scanning books: before immersing yourself into a new book, it may often be worth scanning its content to have an overall idea of what the author is trying to say. This strategy has been described in great detail in the 1940 classic by Mortimer J. Adler called “How to Read a Book”. The author argues that is makes sense to approach a new book in steps, going deeper with each iteration; the “pre-reading” phase, or inspectional reading, as Adler calls it, helps absorbing the basics of the book in the most time-efficient manner and deciding whether or not the book is worth a closer inspection. By the way, this book is also available on Blinkist :)

💡 Recapping books: another situation where Blinkist can be helpful is reminding yourself the essence of a book you’ve already read a while ago. There are some titles which are so good it’s worth going back to them from time to time and re-incorporating their ideas into your worldview. Otherwise, a certain book can prove more valuable to you as time goes by and outside conditions change – and re-reading a blink of it can help you quickly refresh your memory.

Let’s look at one particular example of how the Blinkist app can be combined with reading full books:

1. First, compile a long list of title that might be interesting for you to read – for example from one of those “what famous people read” articles and/or from personal recommendations you’ve received lately (it helps to have a dedicated note for that in your favourite note-taking app like Evernote, Google Keep or Dropbox Paper).
2. When your list becomes at least several dozen items long, add the respective blinks to your personal library on Blinkist and go through them in a methodical manner (e.g. 2-3 per week). In case a particular book is not available on Blinkist (this happens about even 10th book for me), you can search for a summary in one of the competing services we’ve listed above.
3. Make notes in your list after reading each blink, detailing whether it got you interested in the book. When this is done, you’ll have a filterable list of “worth reading” titles which you can now go through in full, by e.g. buying them on Amazon or at your local physical bookstore.
4. It is also worthwhile going through the book’s summary right before starting the full version as well as some time after finishing the book – this will help improve assimilation by reminding you of the author’s overarching ideas, free of minor details and side-stories.

For those of you who enjoy infographics, here’s a visual representation of the summary-aided reading process we discussed above.

Click on the image to view the full version in an overlay:

The above routine can be repeated regularly as you go through your existing short-list and as new titles come out. The best part about it is that it strikes a balance between getting as much as possible from worthy books while still acquainting yourself reasonably well with all other titles – all while optimizing your time use and cash expenditures.

Is It Worth Paying for Blinkist?

This is one of the most frequent questions faced by the new users of the service; each has to answer it for themselves according to own preferences, yet here’s a way to put the cost of the Blinkist Premium subscription into perspective.

At $99.99 per year, the annual payment translates into $8.34 per month – which is roughly equivalent to 2-3 cups (depending on where you live) of takeaway coffee from your favourite coffeeshop chain; not a high price to pay for access to the repository of condensed knowledge of the human race.

Another way to consider Blinkist pricing is by looking from the perspective of its function of pre-selecting full books. The average price for the most popular Blinkist titles is approximately $11 on Amazon (Kindle e-book versions).

If we take into account the fact that book quality varies and not every single one feels like it was worth your time afterwards, you can expect to spend $20-$30 per worthy book on average. Blinkist can help reduce this cost several times over, at a fixed price of less than $8 per month, by helping pre-select which books to read in full.

To sum up, the annual billing cycle of the service masks the fact that Blinkist costs no more than three takeaway coffees per month, all the while also saving money by helping to pick full-size books more effectively.

Bonus: Exclusive Blinkist Discount, 20% Off Premium

We are proud to offer an awesome deal in cooperation with Blinkist: an exclusive link that allows saving $17 on the first year of a Blinkist Premium plan. It’s much easier to use than a coupon code and works regardless of whether you already have a free account or still need to create one.

In order to use the promo price, please take the following steps –

1. Click the button below to visit the official Satori + Blinkist offer page (it will open in a new window automatically):

   Get 20% off first year at Blinkist ›

2. The discount will automatically be subtracted from your purchase price. Enjoy the best repository of condensed human knowledge!

P.S. in case the link above does not work (although it should), there’s another way: you can try visiting this link – the Blinkist website will say that “the promo has expired” yet will give you a nice discount nevertheless :)

Our Verdict – and Over to You!

Overall, Blinkist is a well-thought-through service that inspires to read more and makes it easy to do so as well. Apart from value for money, its most prominent features include a large library, a clutter-free reading interface on multiple devices, and audio abstracts that help absorb new knowledge on the go.

Still having questions about Blinkist or not sure whether it’s worth it? Already using the service and want to share your experiences? Be sure to visit the comments section below, let’s discuss!

Affiliate Disclosure: we believe it is worth letting you know that some of the links in this article are affiliate links, which means we get a small from purchases made via those links. The good news is that it does not affect the amount you pay – so if you found our content helpful (or just used our promo code at the end of this post), we encourage to use our links for ordering the Blinkist Premium plan if you decide to do so :) Cheers!