💡 WiseUp! Vol. 81 — How to read hard books, bring in your Twitter/X bookmarks, and check your Daily Review on your phone

📍 Let's start with a reading recommendation

How to actually read hard books

Paul Musso, the "Micro Philosopher," breaks down how to understand tough books into levels, beginning with the most granular: words. His guide (part one of a projected series) is one of the more tactical takes on reading comprehension that editor Abi has come across. "Just as every song is a collection of notes that are arranged to produce complex and interesting passages, every text is a collection of words, sentences, and paragraphs that are being used in interesting but sometimes challenging ways."

From the support inbox

Have questions about using Readwise or Reader in your workflow? We'd love to be your guide! Reply to this email with your question and you might be featured in an upcoming issue. Even if your question isn’t featured, we’ll respond to every message.

❓ A Readwise question from Seamus H:

Can I get Daily Review reminders on my phone without relying on the email?

Yes, you can set up push notifications from the Readwise app! These run on the same frequency you choose for Daily Review in your preferences. Click on the notification to do your Daily Review completely in the app to skip the email.

❓ A Reader question from Michael D:

Can I see when I made a highlight?

Wondering when you originally made a highlight? Select the highlight, open the ••• menu, and you’ll find the highlight date at the bottom. It’s a handy bit of context for spotting outdated information, remembering what you were researching at the time, and following how a topic has changed over time.

📖 New help doc of the week

Teach your old Twitter bookmarks to migrate

Bookmarks don't have to stay caged in the bird app. Cayla's rewritten Twitter guide covers the new backfill feature that imports every last one, original dates intact, and the redesigned settings page that routes each type of save to Readwise, Reader, or both.

🎬 New video of the week

The best of Twitter, off Twitter

Hate it or love it, Twitter remains a powerful place for discovering case studies, industry expertise, and hot takes from founders. And thanks to our Twitter List functionality, you can get a daily digest of all this wisdom delivered directly to your Reader account.

📰 Aug 08 - Aug 14 updates

What's new in Reader and Readwise

✍️ Improved Adding Manual Highlights — Johannes redesigned the flow for manually adding highlights in the Readwise app. Book search now sits right in the header next to your recent books, and after saving you can tap "Add another highlight" without redoing your setup: the app keeps your selected book and input method, whether you're typing, dictating, or scanning. A clear Done button wraps things up when you're finished.

📷 Improved Highlight Scanning — Thanks to Johannes, scanning highlights in the Readwise app now remembers your preferred highlighting mode instead of asking every time (and you can change it right from the camera screen), selecting a passage from a scan is more precise, the analyzing animation stays smooth from capture to result, and a crash when previewing scans on some Android phones is gone.

📑 Improved Highlight Details — Ibai brought back some per-highlight details that got lost in the Readwise redesign. Page and location numbers show on highlight cards again, chapter headings appear in full instead of being truncated or missing, and each highlight's sheet now shows when you last reviewed it. He also reordered the card's action buttons so the ones you reach for most come first.

🖼️ Fixed Highlight Sharing — Sharing a highlight from the Readwise app had a few issues: the share screen could go completely unresponsive on iOS, cover-art cards sometimes dropped words from the middle of a quote and replaced them with ellipses, and creating a share image after visiting a book's detail screen could fail outright. Johannes and Ibai worked through all three, so your quotes now export exactly as written.

🏷️ Fixed Tag Renaming — Renaming or deleting a tag could fail outright on Android, and renaming a tag used by a Themed Review filter could hit a backend error. Ibai and Tristan made some fixes, so tag housekeeping now goes through smoothly.

📕 Fixed Kindle Syncing — Ibai fixed a bug where a stale logged-out response could wipe your fresh Amazon login moments after you connected, and Johannes made sure manually added highlights can no longer be filed into your synced Kindle books. Your login sticks, and Kindle books stay exactly what Kindle sent.

🎴 Improved Daily Review — Ibai gave the Daily Review some attention: book covers now display at proper book proportions instead of getting cropped, and the reminder notification clears itself once you complete your review. Thanks to Adam, recommended books also only offer actions that actually work for them.

📝 Fixed Note Editing — The note-edit button in the Readwise app could stop responding after a single use on iOS. Ibai moved the editor controls out of the native sheet footer, and editing notes now works every time.

📟 Fixed Boox Displays — On Boox e-ink devices, text in the Readwise app could render unreadably small with no way to adjust it. Ibai made the app respect your per-app DPI settings, so your custom display setup renders exactly as you configured it.

🧹 Fixed Small Annoyances — A cleanup batch in the Readwise app: Johannes restored the keyboard popping up when you return to save highlights, and Ibai stopped the relevant-highlights list from jumping to the focused card when you favorite one, added a loading state to the tag detail screen, and fixed long review streaks getting cut off on the success screen.

🔗 Fixed Internal Links — Highlights that contain internal links to Reader documents were rendering them as raw markup on the Readwise website. Rasul made those internal links display as proper clickable links, so hopping between connected notes works the way you'd expect.

🐦 Improved Twitter Setup — Connecting Twitter/X for the first time now switches on bookmark syncing automatically, thanks to Rasul. No more connecting and wondering why your bookmarks haven't shown up. And if you'd deliberately turned bookmarks off, reconnecting won't override your choice.

💬 Fixed Ghostreader Chat — Two Ghostreader fixes in the Reader app from Adam: chat now opens reliably when you start it from a document list, and Lookup no longer returns an empty definition on iOS PDFs, so definitions come back with actual content.

📰 Fixed Daily Digest — Krzys fixed the Daily Digest skipping past articles when you swipe quickly on Android. Each swipe now advances exactly one article, no matter how fast you flick.

🕛 Fixed Published Dates — Articles published today were sometimes showing "12:00 AM" as their date in Reader, with no actual date information. Krzys fixed the formatting so fresh articles now show a sensible published date.

📖 Improved EPUB Display — Artem made sure chapter titles keep their proper heading style instead of collapsing into body text when reading styles are applied, and Krzys capped oversized publisher indentation on mobile so paragraphs no longer start halfway across the screen. Book chapters now look the way their designers intended.

👈 Fixed Swipe Navigation — In the Reader app, swiping back in the shortform toolbar jumped all the way to the first unread item instead of just to the previous one. Adam fixed it so a swipe back takes you exactly one step back.

🗑️ Improved Bulk Delete — Bulk deleting documents in Reader on web now warns you when your selection includes documents you've highlighted or annotated, thanks to Adam. It's now much harder to lose your notes by accident, matching the behavior of bulk deleting on mobile.

🛜 Parsing Updates — Krzys improved how Reader handles documents from fastcompany.com, deepwiki.com, 36kr.com, huggingface.co, and notashelf.dev, and article titles and bylines now display special characters properly instead of raw HTML codes. Thanks to Johannes, RSS feeds from theregister.com also load reliably again, even when the site puts up a bot challenge.

👍 Three recommendations from our team

From technical writer Cayla

Something to read 📖
Despite her previous hit-or-miss experiences with dark academia novels, Cayla decided to give The Incandescent by Emily Tesh a chance, and she can happily report that it paid off. Shaking up the usual structure by following a professor instead of a student, the story touches plenty of dark themes (demons and possessions and death, oh my!) but somehow manages to feel like a cozy, alma mater-branded cardigan while doing it.

Something to focus ✏️
Cayla’s handwriting is chicken-scratchy on a good day, but it gets even worse when trying to keep hold of a slim and slippery Apple Pencil. To improve her penmanship and reduce hand cramping, she picked up some ergonomic silicon grip holders. (Bonus: it’s a 2-pack, so she’s using the extra for her ReMarkable stylus.)

Something to unwind 🎶
After her experience last year dealing with a backpack at the Tomorrowland music festival, Cayla decided that a different tactic was needed. This year, she did extensive research and got herself a Patagonia Terravia Mini Hip Pack. Wearable on the hips or as a sling, the little bag’s surprisingly capacious nature meant she could have all of her essentials easily on hand each day of the festival, without sacrificing any danceability. (She’s been using it since returning home too, and it works just as well for day-to-day outings!)

💬 From the Readwise group chat

Cracked, not crashed

One moment of silence for Kris's reading session, glitched not by a bug, but by gravity.