Here's what 'Bookbhook' app can do for booklovers
An app (also a website), Bookbhook gives you the ‘gist of the book’. Pooja Patel checks it out
In our fast paced world, where time is always short, there's an increasing number of people who wish to read more, but don't find the time to do it. Addressing this problem is bookbhook.com, which provides brief summaries of books.
"Bookbhook curates life-changing non-fiction books and long-forgotten short stories and converts them into handcrafted book summaries and flash-format fiction," says founder and chief editor Gaurav Gupta. Bookbhook covers 16 genres, ranging from personal improvement to travel.
A non-fiction book usually comprises of around 65,000 words, which Bookbhook summarises in 3,000 - 3,500 words. The idea is to create a 'takeaway' of sorts for readers who want to read, but are too busy to do so. Books are selected for summary on the basis of popular bestseller lists, Bookbhook user recommendations, as well as reading lists recommended by leaders in various fields.
There's a bit of uber cool technology involved to create these summaries. The books' content are 'edited' on an Artificial Intelligence-based software and converted into audio versions using Amazon Polly, a text-to-speech application. Short stories are converted into a 'Whatsapp chat' format of story-telling, currently available only on the Android app. Also in the pipeline, are summaries of books in regional languages.
The concise summaries of the book tell of key points, its underlying message and even quote important passages from it. All in all, it provides a compressed version of the book without taking away its essence. And if you do really enjoy the summary and wish to read the entire book, there's an option to buy the book online.
For The Bookworm
Blinkist: This app offers condensed book summaries of 2,500 books in 19 categories in the non-fiction genre. The app offers key ideas of the book, and summaries that can be read in around 15 minutes. With text and audio summaries, the paid app offers a 7-day free trial period on Android as well as iOS.
Serial Reader: This free app approaches the problem of busy readers with too little time to read in a different way – it breaks down books, around 450 literary classics in English, into easy manageable chunks delivered to your mobile. So you could, say, read ‘Dracula’ in 15 days or ‘Anna Karenina’ in two months.