Readwise is taking on Kindle and Kobo for ebook supremacy
Readwise is taking on Kindle and Kobo for ebook supremacy
Readwise 正在挑战 Kindle 和 Kobo 在电子书领域的霸主地位。
Taking on Kindle is hard. Beating Goodreads might be really easy. For the last several years, Readwise has been building tools for power readers. There’s the eponymous product, Readwise, which stores and categorizes your Kindle highlights to help you remember what you’ve read. There’s Readwise Reader, an app for reading newsletters, PDFs, and web articles you’ve saved for later. And now there’s Readwise Books, a full-fledged platform for buying, reading, and talking about books.
挑战 Kindle 很难，但打败 Goodreads 可能非常容易。过去几年里，Readwise 一直在为深度阅读者打造工具。同名产品 Readwise 可以存储并分类你的 Kindle 笔记，帮助你回顾所读内容；Readwise Reader 是一款用于阅读稍后阅读的通讯、PDF 和网页文章的应用；而现在，Readwise Books 作为一个购买、阅读和讨论书籍的完整平台也应运而生。
Readwise Books is currently in beta, available through invite or to existing Readwise subscribers. I’ve been testing the app for a few days, and it’s a much bigger take on reading than most. Tristan Homsi and Daniel Doyon, Readwise’s cofounders, like to call the platform “Strava for reading” because it can track how long, how much, and how fast you read, and it can show that information to friends you make in the Readwise Books app. The app’s homepage is a feed of what other people are reading, with comments and recommendations laced throughout.
Readwise Books 目前处于测试阶段，仅限受邀用户或现有 Readwise 订阅者使用。我测试了几天，发现它对阅读的诠释比大多数应用都要宏大。Readwise 的联合创始人 Tristan Homsi 和 Daniel Doyon 喜欢将该平台称为“阅读界的 Strava”，因为它能追踪你的阅读时长、阅读量和阅读速度，并能将这些信息展示给你在应用内结识的好友。应用主页是一个信息流，展示着他人的阅读动态，并穿插着评论和推荐。
“Strava for reading” wasn’t the original goal of Readwise Books, which has been part of the Readwise plan since the beginning. “Literally, Dan and I talked about this when we first met,” Homsi says. “We feel like Kindle could be so much better. We really didn’t think it would take nine-plus years to be able to get to this point.” But it turns out, Doyon adds, that for all their ideas about innovation in books, “no one sits around wanting a better Kindle.” But there is one thing they do wish for: a better Goodreads. “Everybody hates Goodreads.”
“阅读界的 Strava”并非 Readwise Books 最初的目标，尽管它从一开始就是 Readwise 计划的一部分。Homsi 说：“我和 Dan 在第一次见面时就谈过这个。我们觉得 Kindle 本可以做得更好。我们真的没想到要花九年多的时间才能走到这一步。”但 Doyon 补充说，尽管他们对书籍创新有很多想法，但“没人会整天盼着一个更好的 Kindle”。不过，人们确实渴望一件事：一个更好的 Goodreads。“每个人都讨厌 Goodreads。”
In a sense, then, the plan for Readwise Books is to take on Kindle by first taking on Goodreads. The Readwise Books app offers a nice way to track books you want to read, are reading, and have read; it even syncs with your Kindle account to let you track books you’ve bought from Amazon by taking pictures of your starting and ending pages. You can rate and review books and see what others have said. It’s a little Strava, a little Letterboxd, and a lot nicer to look at than Goodreads.
从某种意义上说，Readwise Books 的计划是通过先挑战 Goodreads 来挑战 Kindle。Readwise Books 应用提供了一种便捷的方式来追踪你想读、正在读和已读的书籍；它甚至能与你的 Kindle 账户同步，通过拍摄起始页和结束页的照片来追踪你在亚马逊购买的书籍。你可以对书籍进行评分和评论，并查看他人的评价。它既有一点 Strava 的影子，又有一点 Letterboxd 的风格，而且界面比 Goodreads 好看得多。
The long-term goal, of course, is to get people to stop buying Kindle books and start buying from Readwise. Homsi and Doyon have spent the last several years working to reach deals with all five of the major US publishers in order to have a competitive library of books available. That meant endless negotiations, security reviews, DRM debates, and more — both cofounders seem exhausted just talking about the process. But eventually, by several small miracles, they got the deals done. And since those deals govern the price of books, and many things about how they’re sold and presented, they bring Readwise to a nearly even playing field almost immediately.
当然，长远目标是让人们停止购买 Kindle 书籍，转而从 Readwise 购买。Homsi 和 Doyon 在过去几年里一直致力于与美国五大出版商达成协议，以建立一个具有竞争力的图书库。这意味着无休止的谈判、安全审查、DRM 辩论等等——两位联合创始人光是谈论这个过程就显得精疲力竭。但最终，凭借几个小小的奇迹，他们达成了协议。由于这些协议决定了书籍的价格以及销售和展示方式，它们使 Readwise 几乎立即处于一个相对公平的竞争环境中。
It all took a lot longer than expected, but Doyon and Homsi think their timing might actually be pretty good. Digital book reading continues to grow, particularly among young people; a huge amount of that reading happens on phones and tablets. Meanwhile, a new crop of E Ink devices like the tiny Xteink and the Boox Palma line have expanded the universe of available hardware for a company like Readwise.
这一切花费的时间比预期的要长得多，但 Doyon 和 Homsi 认为他们的时机其实相当不错。数字阅读持续增长，尤其是在年轻人中；大量的阅读发生在手机和平板电脑上。与此同时，像小巧的 Xteink 和 Boox Palma 系列这样的一批新型电子墨水屏设备，为 Readwise 这样的公司扩展了可用的硬件生态。
Not long ago, Doyon says, they would have had no choice but to build an e-reader of their own. (And he says they still might.) Now, they can just make sure it runs on an E Ink-friendly flavor of Android.
Doyon 说，不久前，他们别无选择，只能制造自己的电子阅读器。（他说他们未来仍有可能这样做。）现在，他们只需要确保应用能在兼容电子墨水屏的 Android 系统上运行即可。
After a couple of days using Readwise Books, I can say confidently I already like it better than practically all of its competition. It’s a much nicer-looking app than anything you’ll get from Kindle or Kobo; it has lots of ways to customize how books look; and at least for now, I’m finding the tracking features compel me to read more instead of annoying me. (Homsi says some early versions of the gamification features were substantially more annoying.) I’ve found a few bugs, and the half-integration with Kindle is a little confusing in spots, but it’s already a really nice place to read.
在使用 Readwise Books 几天后，我可以自信地说，我已经比几乎所有竞争对手更喜欢它了。它的界面比 Kindle 或 Kobo 的任何应用都要美观；它提供了多种自定义书籍外观的方式；至少目前为止，我发现追踪功能促使我阅读更多，而不是让我感到烦恼。（Homsi 说，游戏化功能的早期版本确实要烦人得多。）我发现了一些漏洞，与 Kindle 的半集成在某些地方也有些令人困惑，但它已经是一个非常好的阅读场所了。
Of course, I, like millions of other people, already own a Kindle and lots of Kindle books. Switching ebook platforms is hard, and Doyon says he’s not counting on everyone to do it right away. He says he’s hopeful Readwise can persuade existing users to switch, in order to sync their notes and progress more seamlessly. He’s also hoping that the advent of AI, and the ways in which AI reliance may rot our brains, will get a lot of people back into the idea of reading more deeply again. And that a bunch of those people might be looking for a nicer, more social place to do so.
当然，我和数百万其他人一样，已经拥有了 Kindle 和大量的 Kindle 书籍。更换电子书平台很难，Doyon 说他并不指望每个人都能立即转换。他希望 Readwise 能说服现有用户进行转换，以便更无缝地同步他们的笔记和进度。他还希望人工智能的出现，以及对人工智能的依赖可能导致大脑退化的问题，能让许多人重新回归深度阅读。而这些人中，可能正有人在寻找一个更好、更具社交性的阅读平台。