Shortform Daily Book Summaries

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.

I really want to like this app, but it has several issues: 1) it sometimes doesn’t save the position of where you left off 2) the text doesn’t scroll with the audio recording and the audio menu takes up a huge amount of space (I like to read and listen for maximum learning) 3) highlighting text is buggy The actual summaries are great though!

I like the amount of material offered and the more in-depth summaries. However, the UI has issues. The highlight feature isn’t always responsive, sometimes highlights more than the selected texts, or won’t highlight at all.

The books they tell you to sign up and read don’t even exist after you pay them. I was getting a summary for The Game, by Neil Strauss on Google and their website had it but it said if I need to read the full summary I must pay. I signed up and paid then return to the website for the book, clicked full summary…. Welp! The book doesn’t exist in their collection. I even searched it and nop not there.

Cannot get past the black screen

As a professor, I find this app valuable for my work, helping me identify relevant course materials. However, I’m disappointed with its limitations, such as the inability to download summaries as PDFs or copy and paste content with proper citations (as other similar services for fiction/literature allow). These restrictions make the service feel overpriced for my needs.