💡 WiseUp! Vol. 70 — ICYMI: features and tricks you might have skipped (and shouldn't)

📍 Let's start with a reading recommendation

Choose your challenge: big book summer

Very few readers took editor Abi up on her offer to read Anna Karenina, and that's okay. Maybe it's not the big book for you. So pick your own: get inspired by this quiz on the first lines of famous novels, or browse this guide to modern classics. "A classic is something that everybody wants to have read and nobody wants to read.” - Mark Twain

Abi's 20% through Anna Karenina and still chipping away. Want us to keep you accountable? Reply and tell us what you're committing to :)

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: 

🎧 Your Daily Review, now in podcast form

Audio Daily Reviews landed a little while back and they’re worth revisiting if you haven’t tried them yet. Instead of sitting down to read your review, you can now listen to it, complete with high-quality voices and smooth transitions between highlights. Think of it as a personalized podcast made entirely from the best ideas you’ve already read. Great for commutes, walks, or any time your eyes need a break.

❓ A Reader question: 

🎧 Your podcasts, now highlightable

You already save articles and newsletters to read later, but what about the podcast episode everyone keeps referencing? Reader now generates a permanent, highlightable transcript when you save an episode link from Spotify, Pocket Casts, Apple Podcasts, or Overcast. You can also subscribe to a podcast’s RSS feed directly in Reader and generate transcripts with a tap. Same reading experience you already love, just for your ears’ favorite content too. Check out the guide to get started.

📖 New help doc of the week

A hidden gem for heavy highlighters

You no longer need to leave Reader to browse highlights by tag. Reader can now display all your highlights for a given tag in a single view, something that previously required switching over to Readwise. Cayla’s guide explains how to find tag views on both web and mobile, plus how you can export them for use outside of Reader.

🎬 New video of the week

Better in sepia?

In case you missed it, here’s one of our favorite indie hacks for changing your default Reader theme to sepia—no CSS knowledge needed!

📰 May 23 - May 29 updates

What's new in Reader and Readwise

🆕 NEW! Better Search — Thanks to Mati, Reader's search can now look across your entire library and not just the documents synced to the device you're on, so it surfaces more of what you're looking for and puts the strongest matches up top. This search should also be faster and more accurate. Turn on the Better Search (beta) toggle on the Search page to try it. (Note that if you're offline, Reader automatically falls back to the original on-device search.)

🔍 Improved Quick Lookup — Tristan fixed a bug where the first time you used Quick Lookup on a document, it could come back empty. Tristan and Adam also added some polish this week: you can now turn off Quick Lookup from within the lookup sheet itself, the icon got a fresh look, and the setting was renamed to better match what it does.

💬 Fixed Ghostreader Citations — Piotr fixed a bug where clicking a citation in a Ghostreader answer could jump to the wrong spot on the first click. Citations now land in the right place, and the cited passage is highlighted more precisely.

🔄 Fixed Ghostreader Auto-Features — Ghostreader no longer switches off your auto-features (summaries and tagging) when it hits a temporary rate limit, so they keep running as expected. Shipped by Tristan.

🔀 Updated Kindle Sync Page — Amazon retired the old read.amazon.com/kp/notebook page, so users were seeing a 404 page when trying to sync their Kindle highlights to Readwise. Tristan shipped a fix that points the Kindle sync to the correct notebook URL.

📥 Fixed Library Imports — Rasul handled a change in how the Library app exports highlights, so Readwise imports keep working smoothly.

📕 Fixed EPUB Uploads — Tadek fixed a crash that could hit EPUBs whose files sit inside a nested root folder, so more of your books upload on the first try.

🧩 Fixed ChatGPT CoPilot — Krzys resolved an issue with the Readwise CoPilot extension triggering 429 ("too many requests") errors on ChatGPT.

🌓 Fixed Dark Mode Menus — A selector pill in the highlight and note menus was invisible in dark mode. It shows up clearly again, thanks to Krzys.

📖 Fixed E-Ink Labels — Navigation labels were getting clipped on e-ink devices like the Onyx Boox. Krzys shipped a fix so they now display in full.

⌨️ Improved Command Palette — Thanks to Krzys, you can now get to help options faster in the app: the Cmd+K palette recognizes "support" and "help" as search tags that will bring up options for submitting a ticket to our team.

🛜 Parsing Updates — Krzys improved how Reader handles posts from The Register, Substack, and Medium. He also fixed archive.is security-check pages that were sometimes replacing WSJ article content in RSS feeds.

👍 Three featured finds from the team

From head of bizops Fernando

Something to read 📖
Fernando just finished reading Inside the Box. He decided to give it a try after the author was featured in WiseUp! and Wisereads. It’s an entertaining read and makes a convincing case for its core idea: that constraints help us navigate life better.

Something to focus 🌲
Fernando is getting back to basics. He takes a walk in nature after lunch to recharge and clear his head. Attention Restoration Theory (ART) shows that spending time outdoors, or even looking at natural scenes, helps restore focus and reduce mental fatigue.

Something to unwind 🛶
Fer is really enjoying Widow's Bay right now. It's a horror-comedy that strikes the perfect balance between genuine scares and laugh-out-loud humor, with a fun, engaging premise: a long-suffering mayor tries to turn his haunted New England island into a tourist hotspot while dealing with sea witches, eccentric locals, and his moody teenager.

💬 From the Readwise group chat

Dream job simulator (a close one)

There's two kinds of people: those who see "sort 3,072 books by cover and title" and think "that's a job", and those who think "that's a Friday night."

We know which one Cayla is.