💡 WiseUp! Vol. 78 — Capture your best ideas, our summer reading list, and GPT-5.6 in Ghostreader

📍 Let's start with a reading recommendation

How to capture an idea

Something about summertime and sunshine gets editor Abi into a creative mood, so this week she's reading and recommending This guide from Jenna O'Brien on how to capture and execute on ideas with the same nostalgic childhood doggedness that had us writing books with twistable crayons. The advice holds up even if your ideas skew more spreadsheet than sketchbook. "Sort of in line with the 'build it, and they will come' philosophy, if you make a space for something, you are more likely to engage with it. Put fruit out on the counter, and you will likely eat more fruit; put books on your nightstand, and you are likely to read more before bed, etc. We are able to shape our own behaviors through intentional lifestyle design. If you’d like ideas to flow more freely, you have to make a safe home for them to land."

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 Gunnar W:

Is it possible to emphasize something within a highlight?

You can use markdown formatting to customize how your highlights look, and to add emphasis to certain parts of a passage. For example, you can use markdown to add a hyperhighlight using two underscores on either side of the text, like so:  __Really awesome line of text.__

❓ A Reader question from Steve H:

Can you make it possible to display the time while reading?

Yes! You can now keep an eye on the time without leaving your reading. Turn on "Show clock" in the Reader mobile app's settings and the current time stays visible while you read.

📖 New help doc of the week

Build your own Markdown export template in Reader

Did you know you can edit the Markdown template Reader uses when you export a document's notes and highlights? This week's featured documentation covers all ten variables available in the template so you can shape your exports to fit your workflow.

🎬 New video of the week

Do this before you travel

We love flights because it gives us hours of uninterrupted reading time... unless your documents aren’t downloaded 😒 To avoid any in-flight surprises, make sure you turn on this feature before you board.

📰 June 27 - July 3 updates

What's new in Reader and Readwise

🎉 NEW! Readwise 2.0 — The Readwise iOS and Android apps have been rebuilt from the ground up, and they're live now. Your library, your streak, your workflows, and your Daily Review are all exactly where you left them — the apps just finally look and feel as good as they deserve: fresh design, smoother animations, and much faster everywhere. You'll also find better, more accurate search, a smoother Daily Review, a beautiful new Stats screen, and new ways to capture — scan your paper book annotations, add highlights by voice, and chat with your highlights via AI. Update the app to try it all.

🎚️ Fixed Daily Review Tuning — Ibai restored precise frequency tuning in the new app: you can once again dial in exactly how often each book shows up in your Daily Review, rather than just more/less, and adjusting it no longer crashes on large highlight libraries.

📚 Fixed Adding Supplemental Books — Ibai brought back the option to add supplemental books, so you can search for any book and pull its popular highlights into your library right from the Add & Sync screen.

⌨️ Fixed Hidden Next Button — Ibai fixed a bug where the keyboard could cover the Next button while typing out a highlight on smaller phones with larger text sizes. The button now stays visible above the keyboard the whole time.

📱 Fixed Boox Display Cutoff — Ibai fixed the intro flow being cut off on Boox e-ink devices like the Go 7, where pages rendered too low to read — or even log in. The app now fits itself to the screen properly on those devices.

🔗 Improved Kobo Syncing — Ibai kept the Kobo sync flow inside the app instead of ejecting you out to Safari partway through, so connecting your Kobo is one smooth trip.

🖼️ Fixed Image Export Buttons — Johannes fixed the highlight image export controls getting pushed off-screen on smaller devices, so the share buttons stay visible while you're crafting a beautiful highlight image.

🏷️ Fixed Tag Lists — Ibai fixed a bug where action tags from long chains of concatenated highlights (like c5, c6, or c12) could show up in your Tags section with a count but nothing behind them. Your tag list now stays clean no matter how many highlights you chain together.

📈 Fixed Stats Calendar — Piotr fixed the Readwise stats page claiming "Your account was not active" on the last day or two for people with perfectly active subscriptions. The Daily Review calendar now refreshes the moment a new review is created instead of serving a stale snapshot.

📄 Improved Kindle Exports for Code-Heavy Articles — Rasul improved how Send to Kindle handles articles packed with code. Inline code keeps its monospace styling, long lines wrap cleanly inside code blocks, and stray SVG tooltip metadata no longer leaks into the body, so articles like Rewriting Bun in Rust now render properly on your Kindle.

🔀 Fixed Missing Raindrop Highlights — Thanks to Rasul, a Raindrop import that fails midway no longer records a false-successful checkpoint. Later syncs will now pick up the highlights they would have silently skipped, so your Raindrop library should stay complete.

🎙️ Fixed Apple Podcasts Saves — Since mid-July, every Apple Podcasts episode saved to Reader was coming in as "Unnamed podcast" by "Unknown", because Apple's episode pages had started returning errors instead of the page itself. Tristan added a fallback that looks the episode up directly through Apple's catalog, so podcasts save with the right title and show again.

🎬 Improved Video Highlight Banner — Adam polished the banner Reader shows when highlights can't be rendered on a video document, so it explains itself and points you at what to do next instead of leaving you guessing.

📖 Improved YouTube Transcript Tooltip — Adam clarified the tooltip copy on the YouTube transcript control in the Reader web app, so the button explains what it does before you press it.

📝 Fixed Notes in the Margin — Adam fixed highlight notes not appearing automatically in the margin even when there was plenty of room for them, across the Reader web and desktop apps as well as the browser highlighter extension.

🧩 Fixed Highlighter Extension Rough Edges — Adam cleared out a couple of annoyances in the browser highlighter extension: the note and tag popover was unreachable on highlights taller than your screen, and highlights could render invisible on shared documents if you had the extension installed.

🤖 NEW! GPT-5.6 in BYOK Ghostreader — If you bring your own OpenAI key, the new GPT-5.6 family (Sol, Terra, and Luna) is now selectable in the Ghostreader prompt model dropdown, alongside GPT-5 mini, GPT-5 nano, and GPT-5.4 mini. Thanks to Piotr, who wired these up and also fixed a crash when expanding "See more" in the prompts model list.

🛜 Parsing Updates — Krzys improved how Reader handles documents from WeChat (carousel images on image-share posts), ruanyifeng.com, techno-science.net, and academialatin.com, and expanded the archive.today paywall-bypass to recognize more mirror shells.

👍 Four recommended reads from the team

Books to pack for your summer travels ☀️

Erin loved Yesteryear because it took a premise she initially avoided (a tradwife influencer waking up in 1855) and turned it into something far richer than a takedown. As Caro Claire Burke backfills Natalie's life, Erin found herself respecting the character's tenacity, and the ending delivered one of the most unexpected plot twists she's ever read.

Abi loved Theo of Golden because it's the kind of inspiring, heartwarming story that leaves you in tears (the good kind). A stranger buying back pencil portraits and returning them to their owners quietly transforms an entire town, and it's already a lock for her top books of the year. No notes.

Romi enjoyed Stoner because it's beautifully written and undeniably a classic. It made her feel sad, hopeless, and brightly present all at once as she followed William Stoner's quiet life devoted to literature. Her one caveat, on record: f*ck Lomax.

Matias liked Lo que el cuerpo sabe because instead of pushing radical lifestyle overhauls, Ezequiel Arrieta offers simple, everyday changes for living a healthier life. He learned a few things about food and exercise, even if he suspects better books exist on the topic.

💬 From the Readwise group chat

Fishy news 🐠

This month in legal news: an Argentine court ruled that goldfish Fede and Magui are sentient beings with rights. They've been relocated from a sushi restaurant's glass display case to, presumably, a very good lawyer's office.