💡 WiseUp! Vol. 26 — Highlight your physical books and talk to your documents!
This week, we're exploring the many ways to read a book, drawing wisdom from two literary greats: Virginia Woolf and Doris Lessing. Plus, we’ll teach you to navigate your content more smoothly and add highlights from your Goodreads library.
On the app side, we’ve improved our OCR tool to make adding highlights from physical books much easier (also: find the updated guide in documentation!). We've also fixed a few bugs and made parsing better for websites like bbc.com and more. Read on for all the details or check out our log of weekly improvements.
Before we get into the tips…
📍 Let's start with a reading recommendation
Virginia Woolf on How to Read a Book
This week, we’re featuring a piece by one of our favorite writers, Maria Popova of The Marginalian, on Virginia Woolf’s essay How Should One Read a Book?—a thoughtful meditation on critical reading. “It would be foolish… to pretend that the second part of reading, to judge, to compare, is as simple as the first — to open the mind wide to the fast flocking of innumerable impressions. To continue reading without the book before you, to hold one shadow-shape against another, to have read widely enough and with enough understanding to make such comparisons alive and illuminating — that is difficult; it is still more difficult to press further and to say, ‘Not only is the book of this sort, but it is of this value; here it fails; here it succeeds; this is bad; that is good.’”
A nice companion read: Doris Lessing on How to Read a Book and How to Read the World 🌎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 Mitch S:
If I haven’t finished a book on Goodreads, can I still get highlights in Readwise?
Yes, you can mark the book as “Read” in Goodreads or add it as a Supplemental Book. Readwise will then pull in popular highlights from other users, so you can enjoy key passages even if you didn’t highlight or finish the book. Give it a try now and see what insights you’ve been missing.
❓ A Reader question from Vecheslav L:
How can I make the Reader automatically open the next article after I archive the current one?
To auto-advance to the next document in the list when you archive your current read, turn on the toggle for "Auto-advance" on the Reader preferences page.
📖 New help doc of the week
Capture highlights from physical books with your device’s camera
This week, Cayla has updated the documentation for our OCR feature, which allows you to add highlights from physical books using your device camera. The revised guide includes step-by-step instructions and helpful imagery to assist you in making the most of this functionality.
🎬 New video of the week
Ask your documents anything
ICYMI, Erin is sharing an early preview of one of our most-requested features: Chat with documents in Reader.
📰 Jun 19 - Jul 25 updates
What's new in Reader and Readwise
📖 Fixed Reading Position — Johannes fixed a bug where certain books would not properly retain their reading positions. Returning to your previous spot in documents, especially books, should now work much more reliably.
🗃️ Fixed Database Slowness — Tristan and Hannes got to the bottom of some periodic slowness and downtime our servers were having. Everything should generally be working much faster thanks to their changes, which include upgraded databases!
↔️ Fixed Heading Alignment — Johannes fixed a bug where headings were incorrectly justified on mobile devices.
📷 Improved OCR Highlights — Thanks to Arek, the OCR camera now properly focuses between captures on iOS 18.5. Arek also made sure the OCR tool uses the standard camera lens instead of the wide-angle lens, giving sharper, more accurate text captures, especially in low light. This should make adding highlights from physical books much easier.
🛜 Parsing Updates — Krzys made improvements to how Reader handles posts from timesofindia.indiatimes.com, facebook.com, sec.gov, and metafilter.com. We also improved our handling of sites that might have multiple top-level domains, like Substack and Medium sites with custom domains, or bbc.com vs. bbc.co.uk.
👍 Three featured finds
From community manager Erin
Something to read 📖
Erin’s birthday is tomorrow! In lieu of writing a long post about the past year, she’s re-reading Rayne Fisher Quann’s lyric critique of personal narratives.
Something to focus 🔖
In preparation for a new e-ink review, Erin’s been reading on the Supernote Nomad and is loving the distraction-free experience.
Something to unwind 🍪
Erin loves the meditative practice of cooking, and she’s become semi-famous in her friend group for these brown butter miso chocolate chip cookies. She wrote down the recipe for us ♥️
💬 From the Readwise group chat
Mayo they live happily ever after
We were amused to hear that a mayo company generously sponsored a friend’s wedding, complete with an allegorical cake topper to commemorate the moment.
With our co-founder’s wedding coming up this weekend, we can’t help but wonder… what would a Readwise-sponsored cake look like?
See you next week!
Warmly,
the Readwise customer support team