Blinkist is a book-summarizing
subscription service
The subscription business model is a business model in which a customer must pay a recurring price at regular intervals for access to a product or service. The model was pioneered by publishers of books and periodicals in the 17th century, an ...
based in
Berlin
Berlin ( , ) is the capital and largest city of Germany by both area and population. Its 3.7 million inhabitants make it the European Union's most populous city, according to population within city limits. One of Germany's sixteen constitue ...
, Germany. It was founded in 2012 by Holger Seim, Niklas Jansen, Sebastian Klein, and Tobias Balling and has eighteen million users as of 2021.
The service provides summaries of over 5,000 bestselling
nonfiction
Nonfiction, or non-fiction, is any document or media content that attempts, in good faith, to provide information (and sometimes opinions) grounded only in facts and real life, rather than in imagination. Nonfiction is often associated with be ...
books in fifteen-minute reads, otherwise known as Blinks, or book-in-blinks. The summaries are available in English and German.
Features
Users can browse books within 27 categories which include
Entrepreneurship
Entrepreneurship is the creation or extraction of economic value. With this definition, entrepreneurship is viewed as change, generally entailing risk beyond what is normally encountered in starting a business, which may include other values th ...
& Small Business,
Politics
Politics (from , ) is the set of activities that are associated with making decisions in groups, or other forms of power relations among individuals, such as the distribution of resources or status. The branch of social science that studies ...
, Marketing & Sales,
Science
Science is a systematic endeavor that builds and organizes knowledge in the form of testable explanations and predictions about the universe.
Science may be as old as the human species, and some of the earliest archeological evidence for ...
,
Economics
Economics () is the social science that studies the Production (economics), production, distribution (economics), distribution, and Consumption (economics), consumption of goods and services.
Economics focuses on the behaviour and intera ...
,
History
History (derived ) is the systematic study and the documentation of the human activity. The time period of event before the History of writing#Inventions of writing, invention of writing systems is considered prehistory. "History" is an umbr ...
, Communication Skills, Corporate Culture and more. The free app lets the user read a random daily pick. Blinkist provides summaries of books and also provides audio versions of the summaries. The service allows users to sync highlights the book summaries to other services like
Kindle and
Evernote
Evernote is a note-taking and task management application. It is developed by the Evernote Corporation, headquartered in Redwood City, California. It is intended for archiving and creating notes in which photos, audio and saved web content can ...
.
Similar services
Blinkist's competitors include Sumizeit, BUUK App, ''
Booknotes
''Booknotes'' is an American television series on the C-SPAN network hosted by Brian Lamb, which originally aired from 1989 to 2004. The format of the show is a one-hour, one-on-one interview with a non-fiction author. The series was broadcast at ...
'', Snapreads, ReadingIQ,
getAbstract
getAbstract, founded in 1999, is a Swiss and US-based corporation that summarizes books, videos, articles, and other content for business customers.
The summaries are available in English, German, Spanish, Russian, Chinese, French and Portug ...
, Instaread,
BookRags
Ambassadors Group, Inc. is a defunct publicly traded educational travel company based in Spokane, Washington. It was originally an operating division of Ambassadors International, Inc., but was divested into a separate corporation in 2002 to form ...
, and Quiddity.
See also
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CliffsNotes
CliffsNotes are a series of student study guides. The guides present and create literary and other works in pamphlet form or online. Detractors of the study guides claim they let students bypass reading the assigned literature. The company cl ...
*
Chegg
Chegg, Inc., is an American education technology company based in Santa Clara, California. It provides homework help, digital and physical textbook rentals, textbooks, online tutoring, and other student services.
The company was launched in 2005 ...
*
SparkNotes
*
Course Hero
Course Hero is an American education technology website company based in Redwood City, California, which operates an online learning platform for students to access course-specific study resources (homework, essays and tests).
The crowdsourced l ...
*
60second Recap
60second Recap is an educational video project launched in September 2009 to provide 60-second video summaries and analysis of classic literature. The site provides one-minute video commentaries on plot, themes, characters, symbols, motifs, and ...
*
eNotes
eNotes was a free student and teacher educational website founded in 1998 by Brad Satoris and Alexander Bloomingdale, that provides material to help students complete homework assignments and study for exams. Based in Seattle, Washington, eNote ...
References
External links
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{{Germany-company-stub
Companies based in Berlin
Internet properties established in 2012
German companies established in 2012
German brands
Audiobook companies and organizations
Online companies of Germany
Subscription services