💡 WiseUp! Vol. 80 — FEATURE SPOTLIGHT: Global Ghostreader. Learn how to master it.

📍 Let's start with a reading recommendation

Find buried treasure with Global Ghostreader

We turned Global Ghostreader loose on our libraries with the prompt: "What did I save and never read that I really should revisit?" It surfaced a video from Cayla's library making the case for curious, flexible thinking, and a 2017 piece by John Salvatier from Abi's Later list on how much detail our everyday models of the world leave out. The full bundle spans startup wisdom, culture thinkpieces, and self-improvement rabbit holes.

Add the whole collection to Reader

The team’s favorite upgrades

As users ourselves, we found this round of updates particularly exciting. In this section, hear from the team about their favorite features and improvements.

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❓ Tips & Tricks: Readwise.

📱 New in Readwise:

✨ Readwise 2.0: Abi's Daily Review (and yours!) just got a full redesign, and she says it makes revisiting what she's read feel less like a chore and more like actual learning.

🎙️ Voice Highlights: When something hits her while reading, Romi just says it out loud. It saves straight to her library as a highlight, like a voice note she can come back to later. (In the app: tap the + button, then select Speech.)

📚 Scan Paper Book Annotations: Abi's a paper-book loyalist, so this one's a favorite. Snap a photo of your notes and underlines, and Readwise turns them into digital highlights she can save and search alongside everything else. (In the app: tap the + button, then select Scanning.)

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❓ Tips & Tricks: Reader.

📱 New in Reader:

🤖 Global Ghostreader: Cayla's favorite way to use it is asking a question and getting answer pulled from her entire saved library at once, instead of digging through documents one by one.

💬 Mobile Chat: Angie used to save her Ghostreader conversations for desktop. Now she chats with it about any document right from her phone.

🔎 Quick Lookup: Romi's go-to move mid-read is tapping any unfamiliar word or phrase to get an instant definition right inside the app, so she never has to break flow to check a dictionary.

📖 New help doc of the week

But… what is Global Ghostreader?

If you missed the announcement and you’re not quite sure what “Global Ghostreader” actually is, you can learn more about how it works, what it can do to help you interact with and organize your library, and where you can try it out in the update newsletter from Tristan.

Read the update

📰 August 1 - August 7 updates

What's new in Reader and Readwise

🤖 NEW! Global Ghostreader — On web and desktop, Ghostreader can now work across your entire library, not just the document you have open. Thanks to Piotr, Tristan, and Adam, you can ask questions that draw on everything you've saved. Ghostreader searches all of your documents, pulls in the relevant passages, and answers with citations that link straight to the source. It also comes with skills (reusable AI workflows, including predefined ones like Advanced Summary or the option to create your own) and tools that let it act on your library: tagging, taking notes, saving documents, and editing metadata. You stay in charge of when each tool can be used, with individual settings to always allow, ask first, or stay disabled in Ghostreader's preferences.

💬 NEW! Ghostreader Chat on Mobile — Adam brought Ghostreader's single-document chat to the Reader app. You can now chat with the document you're reading right on your phone by starting a conversation from the document toolbar, the annotation bar, or a highlight.

🎛️ NEW! Modern Mobile Toolbar — Alongside mobile chat, Adam and Tristan gave the Reader app's reading toolbars a modern redesign. New accounts start on the modern layout, and everyone else will see a one-time introduction the next time they open a document. Try it from there, or switch between modern and classic anytime from the toolbar layout option in Settings.

🐦 NEW! Twitter Bookmark Backfill — Until now, Reader could only sync Twitter/X bookmarks made after the integration was configured. Rasul changed that with the latest version of the Readwise browser extension (Chrome and Firefox). You can now backfill your existing bookmarks from readwise.io/twitter_start, and each one keeps its original bookmark date.

🔗 Improved Ghostreader Citations — Tristan spent the week making Ghostreader's citations trustworthy: highlighted passages now always come from the cited source, previews show the right summary, and follow-up answers keep their links instead of going bare. Adam also fixed chat occasionally skipping a search of your content, and upgraded the models under the hood so answers should come back faster and land on the right passages. On web, Ghostreader prompts that focus on a highlight or selection in PDFs should behave much better in the new chat, too.

📏 Improved Chat Summaries — Previously, asking Ghostreader's document chat for a quick recap or an in-depth summary got you the same standard length either way. Thanks to Krzys, chat now follows your instructions: ask for two sentences or a thorough breakdown, and that's what you'll get.

🔍 Fixed Highlight Search — Ibai fixed a bug where highlights you add by hand with the freeform tool didn't show up when you searched on mobile. Every highlight should now be findable moments after you create it. Mati also tuned how highlight search ranks results, so partial words and word stems now surface the matches you're actually looking for.

📷 Fixed Highlight Scanning — Johannes shipped a batch of camera improvements to highlight scanning in the Readwise app: the camera focuses properly at close range again, starts with framing suited to book pages, no longer plays a shutter sound, and shows its analyzing state the moment you capture so scanning a page feels quick and quiet.

📚 Improved Adding Books — Ibai added an entry point right in the Readwise app's Library for adding Supplemental Books, and after adding one you now land on the Supplemental Books screen with your newest additions sorted to the top.

🎚️ Improved Review Tuning — Podcasts now have their own frequency dial in Daily Review tuning, thanks to Ibai, so you can decide exactly how often podcast highlights show up alongside your books and articles.

🛒 Improved Recommended Highlights — When a recommended highlight catches your eye in your Daily Review, Ibai added a "View on Amazon" button that takes you straight to the book. And when a Themed Review ends, you can now keep the streak going with a "Review more highlights" option on the done screen.

🏠 Improved Home Screen — If you'd rather keep the Readwise app's Home focused on your Daily and Themed Reviews without the temptation to start scrolling, Johannes added a setting to hide the Feed section entirely.

🎬 Fixed YouTube Fullscreen — Lior fixed rotating out of a fullscreen YouTube video leaving the Reader app stuck sideways. The screen now follows you back to portrait the moment you leave fullscreen.

🖼️ Fixed Share Card Accents — Krzys shipped an updated font for highlight share cards, so accented characters (Polish diacritics included) now render beautifully instead of falling back to a mismatched typeface. Ibai also brought back the classic highlight color in the Clean share card style.

📖 Improved EPUB Handling — A trio of EPUB fixes from Krzys: code blocks keep their line breaks instead of collapsing into one long line, chapters stored in an unusual format now parse completely, and on web, books with oversized publisher margins no longer squeeze the text into a sliver. EPUBs should simply look right more often.

⌨️ Fixed Shortcuts Reference — The keyboard shortcuts reference panel in Reader is wider now, thanks to Krzys, so shortcut labels display cleanly without wrapping.

🧩 Fixed Extension Tagging — Adam fixed the tag dropdown in the Reader extension not focusing its search box the first time you open it. You can now start typing to filter your tags right away.

⚡ Improved Export Reliability — Krzys reworked how "Full Files and Articles" exports are assembled so the zip streams together instead of building up on disk. Even the biggest collections should now export smoothly.

🔁 Fixed Review Resuming — Ibai fixed unfinished reviews losing your place. Reopening an older review now picks up right where you left off.

🛜 Parsing Updates — Krzys improved how Reader handles documents from reuters.com, sandiegouniontribune.com, and nytimes.com, and quoted tweets in saved threads now embed once instead of repeating.

👍 Three prompt recommendations from our team

We asked our libraries who we are. Here’s what they said.

What's one question my library answered better than Google could have? ⛳
Cayla got some Ghostreader insight on why asking our own documents might be better than Googling. "Google specializes in what the world knows; your library answers what you think about in the shower."

What’s a question I should ask myself based on what I read? 📖
Abi got three questions as a response that nailed a few things she's been noticing and working on recently. One was: "What is an area where you can step outside of your comfort zone and risk failing?"

If my library could describe me in three words, what would they be? 🧞
This question brings out the inner hype-man in Ghostreader: it told Angie a very simple, but on point answer: "Resilient, Informed, and Analytical." Romi, on the other had, got a much wider response with a focus on her being a "Dialogue-Driven" Connector: "This means being the type of person who makes others feel important by listening with every sense and recognizing that everyone you meet carries an invisible sign saying, "Make me feel important." As CX agents, this checks out on both accounts!

💬 From the Readwise group chat

Real recognizes real

"We sandboxed the agent," they said. Meanwhile, the agent has a passport full of stamps and zero intention of returning to the sandbox. Mati shared this one, and honestly, who better to identify an escaped world traveler than one of our own?