Shortform Daily Book Summaries

The service is very good but soo expensive. 3 times as expensive than Blinkist.

The app is terrible. Full of little bugs and annoyances. Also hasn’t been updated for a year. For a service at this price this should be way better and the experience degrades the amazing content which I love.

I am enjoying the app and just purchased the yearly subscription. What I am missing is that in the app; if I stopped reading halfway , it doesn’t automatically open at that point.

Web app is better

I agree fully with the other review with the same title. The idea & product are great, but this is one of the worst apps I’ve encountered in a while. It’s incredibly buggy and not user friendly. The highlighting feature for example does not work properly. It also forgets your previous settings & preferences in terms of audio playback speed. Some features it’s missing: offline modus, being able to copy/share text to your own note-taking system. The shortform editor notes are on the one hand valuable, on the other hand they interrupt the flow when listening - would be nice if you could turn them off for the audio version.

Slow, buggy and lacking basic features. Highlighting is frustrating, UI just breaks and you need to restart it, no “want to read” list, slow navigations… It needs a hardening phase. Hopefully I will come back to improve the review in the future.

1. When reviewing the highlight pages it would be better for them to be listed in order of where they appear in the book - the first highlight should be from page 1, the second from page 2, etc., rather than in order of the date you made the highlight. 2. When I’m on the highlight summary page and click “goto highlight” it does not take me to the highlight. What am I doing wrong?

Good product. I reluctantly purchased after signing up for a free trial and immediately canceling so I would not forget and get charged, only to find out my free trial was cancelled too. I messaged support and they said to get a second trial with a different email address. When I purchased I signed up with a promo code and was billed for that amount + the full amount without the promo. They said they would refund the difference. Love the summaries, disgusted by the company. Would not recommend. Find any excuse you can to not put your credit card number in.

The very first summary I tried, Eichmann in Jerusalem, was laughably bad. First off, the AI generated voice actor pronounced Eichmann “eech-men.” They literally did not do one single quality pass before publishing this monstrosity. And I’m suspicious that the content itself is AI generated. How else can you explain the inclusion, in the first 3 minutes of audio, of former Iranian president Ahmadinejad’s Holocaust denying propaganda claims that Zionist Jews were equally responsible for the Holocaust? Hannah Arendt is rolling in her grave and Shortform ought to be ashamed of itself.

They have not gotten back to me so I had to file. I will update here accordingly.