Blinkist: Book Summaries Daily

You’ve got the goods! As for the question and answer section: “Did you learn something new?” A question in English, requires answers from the same language—not just emoji. ☝️

I am extremely disappointed with Blinkist’s predatory renewal practices and lack of accountability. I was recently charged for an annual Premium renewal despite the fact that my account dashboard explicitly listed my status as "Basic" (the free tier). Because the UI showed I was a Basic user, there was no "Cancel Subscription" option available to me. I had no way to stop a renewal that the system claimed didn't exist. I haven't used the app in months and would have canceled long ago if the interface had accurately reflected my status. When I contacted support, they refused a refund, citing that I am "not a new customer." This is a completely irrelevant excuse. This isn't about a change of heart; it’s about a technical discrepancy on their platform that made it impossible for a user to manage their subscription. Charging a user while showing them a "Basic" status is misleading at best and a technical bug at worst. Blinkist would rather keep a one-year fee from a non-user than fix a clear error in their system. Advice to others: Do not trust the account status shown in the app. Check your bank statements and original sign-up emails, because Blinkist’s UI might tell you you’re on the free plan while they’re preparing to charge you for Premium.

I’ve gotten a lot out of the books I’ve listened to so far. However, this experience is ridiculously buggy. Scrolling is very weird/unreliable. I can pause, scroll the text, then resume and it ends up playing from some other completely different part of the book. Also, sometimes a book won’t highlight the text as it’s read. I can’t seem to just start it reading from where I want it to. Would it be so difficult to add a Play option when selecting a word to have it start playing from there? This has made for an extremely frustrating experience with the app, almost to the point where I’m going to start looking for alternatives. It’s completely unintuitive how to play, follow along with the text, and hope you don’t do something that will make it start playing somewhere else in the text than you intend. I’ve also seen chunks of text out of order in a book, coming before where the audio actually starts reading it. Highlighting is a mess. I’ll select a certain range of text, choose Highlight, and it will move the boundaries of the highlight, leaving off letters at the end and adding more at the beginning. If I tap on a saved highlight, it will open the book but not actually scroll to the highlight. You can mark a book as finished, yet it will still show up as In Progress if you have ever gone back and looked at something in it again. Marking it as complete does nothing to resolve this. It would also be nice to have an option to change the reading voice. It bothers me when some sound too expressive, or I’m constantly getting one gender voice when I prefer the other.