Yes, Blinkist and its business of providing 15 minute book summaries is, in fact, legal.
According to their support site, "Our Blinks distill the main ideas and most important concepts from non-fiction books, but they are new, original works of their own, written in our Blinkist style, voice, and format."
For this reason, Blinkist and their services are not considered to be copyright infringement. Think: Cliff Notes but for the modern age.
No, Blinkist is not better than reading a full book, nor is it trying to replace the traditional reading of entire books through its service. Rather, Blinkist's aim is to help synthesize nonfiction books and their material into more easily "digestible highlights and summaries".
Blinkist cofounder Holger Seim says that he doesn't "believe you can convert long form into short form. Less than 10% of our users say they read fewer books, but more than 40% say they read more! We don't want to replace books. We are creating a market that didn't exist and expanding one that did." Many users begin by reading a Blinkist summary and, if intrigued, will go on to read the complete book, while avoiding those that wouldn't have been as good of a fit.
Yes, the overwhelming majority of those who have used Blinkist believe that is a worthwhile service and investment.
On Apple's App Store, Blinkist has 80K reviews averaging an incredible rating of 4.8 out of 5 stars. For those readers who are looking to reach the very core principles of a nonfiction book as quickly and efficiently as possible, Blinkist provides a valuable service.
Blinkist is a book-summarization subscription service based in Berlin, Germany. The company was founded in 2012 by Holger Seim and Sebastian Klein, the company now boasts 18 million users.
Blinkist provides its customers with summaries of over 3,000 non-fiction books. Each of these summaries come in 15-minute reads which are known as "Blinks" Blinkist was also a big hit on Product Hunt, earning the following:
