I spent a long time improving my reading speed, and yet I still want to find ways of cramming more valuable information into my skull more quickly and more easily. So I started to look for ways to outsource my reading - at least partially. I found various book summary sites. My initial thoughts were this would be a way of whittling out the dross of business books more easily and identifying the books that I really want to read.
I wasn't sure if I was going to find them useful or if I was going to end up signing away some money for a pile of badly written essays.
But I decided to sign up as an experiment anyway.
A quick web search identified a few resources for me:
For a low cost version you could try Squeezed Books. Squeezed Books offers 'free' book summaries contributed by anyone. Sadly they don't seem to offer and rss feed or email notification option so you have to keep visiting the site to find out what new summaries people have contributed. This was too much of a 'pull' system so I haven't really read many of these summaries.
I wanted a push system where summaries were sent to me on a regular basis.
I tried the free sample from audiotech.com but I really don't get much from audio books. I have spent so long increasing my reading speed that to have a summary take 20 minutes to finish a pointless waste of time. If audio books work for you and you have nice quiet commute that you want to make more productive or you then this might be a perfect match for you.
So that brings me to 3 options and what distinguishes these?
- getabstract.com offers 2 main subscription options: $299 for access to all the summaries (advertised as 4,500 +), for a year. Or $89 for 34 summaries over the year. Both plans offer a summary a week from their archive emailed to you. You get access to 2 free summaries to see how the summaries work, they offer a money back guarantee.
- summaries.com, for $100 a year give you access to their 570 summaries on file and 1 summary a week emailed to you. You get access to 3 free summaries to see the quality of the summaries
- bizsum.com provide their summaries in pdf, audio, video and a bunch of other formats. For $69.95 you get a summary a week emailed through to you and access to all their summaries on file. I don't know exactly how many are in the archive - I suspect 500+. To get a feel for it there are a few summaries there but also a free 1 month subscription - with a free 2 days to access the full archive of summaries.
While the offer of money back guarantees seems interesting, I prefer to get it free up front. So I picked bizsum.com. I used the two days trial to browse the archive pretty thoroughly. I figured that even if the archive did not have in excess of 4,500 books it would still take me a fair while to get through the 500+ that were there.
BizSum seem to have their marketing pretty well sorted so during the free trial I received a few offers from bizsum that were not on the main web site and so I paid for a 2 year subscription, with access to their sister site bestsum.com for free.
I have been really happy with the quality of the summaries and they have helped me do more than I expected.
I expected that I would use the summaries to see if the book was worth reading. But the summaries themselves have a lot of useful information in them and are generally pretty well written so a lot of the books I do not think I would get much more out of them than I received in the summary.
Summaries have worked out really well for me, and once I've worked my way through the bizsum archive, I suspect I'll sign up for getabstract.com as well and then trawl their archive.
I picked the most cost effective solution to let me experiment with the approach and I have been really happy with bizsum.com so I recommend giving it a shot, hopefully you'll get ofered an even better deal during your month's free trial - and if not - they still seem pretty good value to me.
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