Hack your commute: ‘Read’ a book in 15 minutes
Inspiring ideas to expand your mind on the way to work.
If you’re wondering why ‘read’ is in inverted commas in the headline, it’s because with Blinkist you won’t really be reading history’s greatest tomes in their entirety, merely consuming the most important bits. So when your CEO or new agency partner asks your views on the latest business theories, you’ll be able to call on insights from a credible range of titles.
The app contains summaries of over 1,800 non-fiction books, filtered down to their key messages, which you can read or listen to in 15 minutes. They are being added at a rate of 40 per month.
The library is far from comprehensive, but it does include a section on sales and marketing with around 150 titles at the time of writing. They include some well known authoritative texts, such as ‘Confessions of an Advertising Man’ by David Ogilvy, ‘How Brands Grow’ by Byron Sharp and ‘Free’ by Chris Anderson.
There are also curated lists such as ’10 books that will change how you think forever’.
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Depending on your assiduousness, you could use Blinkist as a means of honing down your interest to the books worth reading in full before shelling out for the real thing on Amazon. Or you could pretend you have read them all and see how long it takes before your superficial knowledge is probed just a little too far by suspicious colleagues.
Either way, Blinkist could be a resource that saves you time while opening up new ideas for sources of inspiration.
After a three-day free trial, the options include a free subscription, where you can ‘read’ one book per day selected by the app; or paid offerings that let you choose your titles and download them, priced at $50 (£41) and up. There are also team rates available for 10 to 50 people.
