Readwise vs Reader read-it-later App - How they work together and what's the difference

hello busy professional today we will talk about readwise versus reader the read later app from readwise it's very confusing I know and that's exactly why I do this video if you're a member of the pavess movement you might have attended a live Q&A session we keep talking about these tools on a regular basis and we keep explaining what the difference is and how they function that's why we do this video I will dive into what's the difference how they are connected what ends up in readwise what ends up in reader and why it's so deeply

integrated in our PKM system and the not taking that we do on a daily basis so on our website in our tool section we have the tool stack that we use at a pess movement and P Paco and I are using personally and here I just want to quickly show you where we position reader actually in the io framework in our productivity setup so you see here the the logo of reader and we symbolized there that reader and readwise are both located in this area and as you can see that's the PKM play so we

solely use this for personal Knowledge Management it has nothing to do with bkm the business Knowledge Management so that's why this is represented then you see two other tools here one is Tana and the other one is heab base and it's crucial now to show you this because it will make a lot more sense later on when I tell you about how we connected these with our not taking apps and why do we use two different not taking apps well that's something that you learn in the PKM like a pro course we differentiate between shallow

think and deep thinking systems so Tana is to us a shallow thinking system and heab base is a deep thinking system so shallow thinking is really the next step after you capture information and you move it forward and you collect as much information as possible once you hit a wall with this tool when it comes to organizing and making even more sense out of it then we move on to the next tool and bring in the distilled information into our deep thinking system and then we visualize it in Hep thease if you want to learn

more about heab base there's a beginners course on this YouTube channel as well so feel free to check it out but today we talk about reader and readwise so now let's dive in what the differences are between reader the read later app and readwise I always prefer to visualize this in a diagram to explain you the theory behind these tools and their different connections how they work so we have the reader app and we have the read by app if you just focus on these two for a moment then it's already crucial to understand that

reader only feeds into readwise it's not the other way around it's not like that they are synchronized and whenever I collect anything in readwise it goes to reader that's not the case it will just get synchronized to readwise something I missed here and let's quickly do this is obviously Kindle all right that's one of the key things that so many people love about readwise that you can read your Kindle books and make highlights and these highlights from your Kindle books will be synchronized to readwise so so I have a book that I'm reading I make

a highlight this highlight goes into readwise the purpose behind this is that I can then leverage space repetition so I can go into readwise or use one of the widgets to keep seeing these highlights over and over again or and that's one of the superpowers of readwise I can synchronize this then to my beloved not taking app or what we call then the Final Destination that's another thing if you're using readwise competition has a really hard time now because readwise synchronized with so many no taking apps already so it's like notion obsidian heab base Tana

synchronizing with all these platform is really really well helpful the only difference is the different ways it synchronizes so it presents the highlights in different ways but to us that's the ultimate purpose to have it in our shallow thinking system or in hease for example Even in our deep thinking system and it doesn't stop with Kindle that's the key here what happens with all the other resources that we have here so X X for example I can actually synchronize X directly with read Wise by just doing bookmarks of X posts so these bookmarks get then

synchronized to readwise I could also save it in reader so why you do this you will see when we talk about for example web articles so web articles you usually save directly to reader to the read later app and the amazing thing about reader it it really makes the website a lot more readable if you're interested how all this looks like this process we have an implementation part in our courses where Paco Dives deep into how he uses reader and how he saves web articles in reader and makes the highlights but the key takeaway here

is that when you save a web article in reader that it is saved in reader it's not synchronizing to readwise the whole article so now you go into reader you start reading this article in your Reader application and start highlighting and only those highlights get then synchronized to readwise and therefore then synchronized to your note aing app and that's amazing the same applies to YouTube videos why should you save YouTube videos in reader well the amazing thing about reader and it's one of the few applications out there if you save a YouTube video link it

will automatically transcribe it or use the transcription and place it in reader so you can read through the transcription and the amazing thing is when you click on any text it will JP to the to the position inside the video so therefore you can watch the video make highlights on these transcripts and therefore take notes already you can add also notes to these highlights those highlights then get synchronized to readwise and readwise synchronizes back to your not taking app so you have it already in a distilled format in your not taking App instead of saving

everything in your not taking app and podcasts that's actually something that just recently launched that we really love to use at the pess movement is snipped snipped is a application that you can use on your phone and you can listen to all the podcast as you would do from Spotify the difference is that you can press a button whenever you think something was interesting and it will not only save the transcript but AI actually will create a perfect transcript also understands where it's the best parts to start and end the saving of this highlight and

then it also synchronize to readwise so it pushes it forward to readwise and this is amazing because when I'm in my car obviously not taking is always hard but that's the place where I'm listening to podcast so there's no way that I can take out an iPad or iPhone and then quickly take notes instead I'm listening I press the button that AI will understand what to pick that I just listened to from this whole one hour podcast it will send this snippet to readwise and readwise will be syncing it to my not taking app so

once I'm back and work on my Knowledge Management then everything is ready that I was listening there and I can process it later on so that's really essentially it obviously there are more ways to connect you can connect things to read wise and reader and so on but this is one of the key elements that I'm using it for one more thing that we could mention is actually PDF files so you can also upload PDF files or PDF books to reader and there's the same process you start highlighting the highlights get synchronized to readwise and

then you can use readwise to move on to your not taking app so I hope this was already useful to you in order to better understand the differences between the two tools so feel free to take a screenshot of this if it is helpful for you and now let's quickly see how this looks in action so here I'm in a book called 4,000 weeks that I'm currently reading let's say I have a deep insight into something and I want to highlight this this is on the Kindle Cloud Reader here but it also works if you're

just on a actually physical Kindle device if you highlight there the synchronization works as well so here we were not supposed to hate Mondays and live for the weekends and holidays okay that's something I think is interesting I highlight this now and you see already on Kindle I could Now take notes as well but I don't want to do this here so I can just keep reading and highlight and forget about it I keep reading and then I highlight something else let's now go to readwise and check how this looks like and now we are

here in readwise and when when you go to connect and Sy you see when you go to import here are all the connections that you can have with other tools to bring the thing in uh here I connected with Kindle and I synced it already and if we go here then you see there we are there are already the two synced highlights I just tested it in the beginning and here we are we were not supposed to hate Mondays and live for the weekends and holidays so if you check out our map again we are

at this stage we just had Kindle and we send the information to readwise so the Highlight is now in readwise now let's check if the synchronization actually works as well by going to tana and in Tana I could just now search for the book for example if you just put in four you see already 4,000 weeks highlights readwise books I go here and now you see the highlights are just showing up here and these are the two that we just have seen and it even shows me the location same here it shows me the location

so this means I always have a reference back and I can find the context of my highlight so now let's have a look how this looks in heab base so you have here the Highlight meta app you just click there and you see on top already 4,000 weeks and there we go we are not supposed to hate Mondays and live the weekends on holidays and now I can click here and it will open up readwise and it brings me to the related content and now I could simply go here and add this to a whiteboard

or create a new whiteboard go here and now we I have the Highlight in here and I can start bringing in more cards and doing my visual thinking here the deep thinking process so I think the amazing thing is that all my highlights are appearing in all the not taking apps that I'm using we are using several not taking apps because we have specific purposes for these not taking apps if this is something you're interested in to build your own perfect productivity tool stack then we highly recommend to take our IOD Journey inside the papess

movement membership as there we teach all the things that you need in order to build this especially if you're over wed with your scattered information all over the place I hope this video was useful for you and brought some clarity between the reader read later app and the readwise native app and share with us in the comments below how do you use these tools as there obviously a lot more ways to use them if you like the video give it a thumbs up share it with your friends and if you haven't already subscribed to the

channel so I can catch you up next time