Blinkist is a subscription service that provides summarized audiobooks from nonfiction books. The majority of the audiobooks are between 15 and 20 min long containing the gist of the original books and are normally organized in bullet points.

I first heard of this website a few months ago and thought that was a really bad idea to summarize a book in a short audiobook and kind of forget about it. Then I saw some online advertisement and this time I considered the use of this service not as a tool for consuming books but as short audio files to practice a target language that I don't feel 100% comfortable listening to a regular audiobook yet - the pros being: good quality recordings, multiples themes and shorter than a unabridged audiobook. So I decided to try the service and listened to some German audiobooks (I have already listened to a full audiobook in German but I need to select the book really carefully to be able to fully understand it). Well, I was really disappointed, even for the language learning purpose I find the summarized books very lousy, with very brief explanations that don't actually gives you enough information about anything and the topic approach make the listening not enjoyable at all. Some random Youtube video probably make a better job summarizing the books. I don't know if it is a 100 % human job or if they use AI, but the end product is not good enough.

Blinkist should look at what Charles River Editors is doing with short e-books (normally about 50 to 100 pages long). It's a different service, they create a short book instead of summarize a existing one, but they manage to create something that is brief but give you a good understand of the subject in question and it's a enjoyable reading.

Blinkist offer a free listening of a specific book everyday in the "Today’s Free Blink" section of their website (no registration required) and they also have a 7 days free trial, so is possible to test their service for free.