💡 WiseUp! Vol. 15 — Beautify your reading with quoteshots, EPUB covers, and more

📍 Let's start with a reading recommendation

On Not Carrying a Camera

While curating Wisereads, editor Abi found an essay by writer-photographer John Rosenthal, who grapples with a familiar dilemma—made sharper in the social-media age—between living a moment and documenting it. After watching his son’s birth entirely through a viewfinder, he stopped carrying a camera around town. "I was in the room when it happened, but was I really there, or had I been hiding behind my camera? I wanted the doctors to do whatever was necessary to bring my child safely into the world, but I also wanted them—and this was of equal importance—not to spoil my photograph. If something had gone wrong and Susan had desperately looked around the room for me, she would have seen a man holding a black box in front of his eyes." Add to Reader

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.

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❓ A Reader question from Matt:

Is there a way to highlight on the go with my AirPods?

Yes! Open Reader’s Account settings, select Headphone gestures, and change the default gesture so that triple‑tap (or double‑tap, if you prefer) is set to Highlight instead of “Jump.” While listening to text‑to‑speech, a quick triple‑tap on your AirPods will then capture the current paragraph hands‑free.

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❓ A Readwise question from Soundara R:

How can I share my highlights with a friend?

Turn your favorite highlights into eye-catching quoteshots, perfect for posting on any social platform. Tap the share icon on any highlight, then pick a style—Pretty, Clean, or Classic: each comes with colors you can tweak to match your vibe. When sharing from your phone, you can save it straight to your camera roll.

📖 New help doc of the week

Customize the visuals of your reading experience

Is the default text in Reader too small for your liking? Are you more of a sans-serif person? Learn all the ways you can tweak the appearance of the reading view to suit your own preference in Cayla’s help documentation.

Read the guide

🎬 New video of the week

For all the sepia lovers:

This week, Erin’s demonstrating how you can warm up your Reader account with a book-like sepia theme hack in minutes—no CSS knowledge needed!

Add to Reader

📰 May 2 - May 9 updates

What's new in Reader and Readwise

📝 Improved PDF Metadata — Thanks to Scott and the power of modern LLMs, we think we've finally found a metadata extraction method that works reliably across a wide variety of PDFs. Titles and author names should now match the information given on page one of any PDF.

📚 Improved EPUB Covers — Tadek improved our book cover parsing. Cover images for EPUBs should now show up much more often!

💌 Fixed Newsletter Styling — Rasul fixed a glitch causing emails to be unstyled in original mode. Newsletters should now have their proper appearance, including elements like fonts, spacing, alignment, and more.

👻 Fixed Ghostreader Prompts — Hannes fixed a glitch that was blocking certain Ghostreader features, like the internal x-ray, from working without a personal API key.

🛜 Parsing Updates — Krzys made more improvements to how Reader handles redirects, as well as documents from arxiv.org, simplywall.st, g1.globo.com, and sciencedirect.com.

👍 Three featured finds

From generalist writer Abi

Something to read 📖
A highlight in her Daily Review nudged Abi back to When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi, a Pulitzer finalist that refreshes her sense of how meaningful—and fleeting—life can be.

Something to focus 💧
This Bluevua reverse‑osmosis countertop filter strips dissolved solids from city tap water, freeing Abi to stay hydrated and fully locked in on work.

Something to unwind 🕯️
These beeswax candles with crackling wicks paint the room in a soft, spa‑like glow—Abi’s favorite signal that the day is done.

💬 From the Readwise group chat

Cringe lessons from the intern

According to our Gen‑Z intern, using a MacBook in a coffee shop is peak cringe—and "avocado toast" is now an outright insult. Heated debate followed, sending us back to Venkatesh Rao’s classic long‑form piece on the cultural saga of avocado toast.

(Typed, naturally, from a café table with toast crumbs beside my MacBook.)