Blinkist: small steps to the big world

Something about Blinkist ... I have seen Blinkist a few times (yes more than one time) on the facebook ads. I don't even bother to ask how am I picked by facebook as target for the ad. Nevertheless it caught my attention. The thing is, it looks like "fast food" in the knowledge world. I thought I am not a big fan of fast food. So I let the ad pass without doing anything.

What had changed.. This reflects how human mind can be easily influenced by the common human bias of "the argument from authority". I have been listening to a pod cast of interviews of German entrepreneurs. In that podcast, the host has a certain fixed pattern. At the end of the interview, he always asks the interviewee, if there are apps that he or she recommends, that help them. That's where Blinkist appeared again and really got me interested.

"Ever read 4 books in a day?, now you can" 

I was suspicious but since there's a trail version, so I gave it a try. There are a few points that make me stick to it:

• The coverage of the titles is quite interesting... they did summary of some "non pop science" books. like books from Richard Dawkins and Jared Dimond (my favorite: "Guns, Germs and Steel") 
• For many titles, they have texts and readings. For me it's a very interesting feature to improve my German understanding with broader variety of subjects. 
• It's fast to get to a general understanding of some subjects, such as Elon Musk's life. 

According  Holger Seim, Blinkist is good for two types of people. One is the kind of people who are really eager to learn but with limited time. The other is the kind of people who like to read many things, variety of things. In the beginning they started with English version and since two years now there are quite a few german titles. If one didn't look a bit deeper into this, would not know that this is actual a german company based in Berlin.

One might be wondering, how the summaries are done. Firstly I thought it's another algorithm. But it's actually very human. The summaries are done by people!! Currently Blinkist has summaries of more than 2200 books, all done by people. The first ones were even summarized by the founder.

I really have to say, I love this app and absolutely one that could be recommended for people who are on the road a lot with their cars and still openminded to learn.