Getabstract

Website:  http://www.getabstract.com

Since February, I have added two and a half hours to my daily commute to work. While listening to Audio books made up for some of the reading time I loss due to the new job, it wasn’t enough to catch up on all the books I wanted to read.

While I read biographies, novels and history books on my down time, most of the books I read are self-development and business books. Luckily, my company had a small choice of business book summaries that were available for download, so I looked through the collection and used them to supplement my reading. The only issue was that the summaries were a little long and the selection didn’t speak to my tastes.

While a few companies service the book summaries market, I was looking for some specific qualities. Most importantly I needs to be affordable, a large selection and I wanted the summaries material more condensed.

Out of all the companies, Getabstract met my criteria. The summaries were 5 to 6 pages long, the title selection was big and library regularly updated. The price seemed steep at first, but when you consider that my wife and I were both starting small businesses and needed access to a lot of information, a six month subscription at 179.00 CAD seemed a good investment. If nothing else, the summaries serve as a great reference for books I’m undecided about buying or already own. Better still, the summaries and the description pages both show a recommendation rating from getabstract for the original material.

The summaries are available in most popular formats including PDF’s and Mobi for Kindle.

The best part of the subscription to getabstract is the Iphone App. It gives you access to the entire library and allows you to stream audio additions of the summaries to the phone. The audio files are small enough that you can stream them over 3G without eating up your data plan.

My only three complaints are that you can’t download it to the phone, create a playlist that you can call up when you want to listen to your chosen summaries and the App doesn’t allow for audio scrubbing. But, I hope these are features that are coming at some point in the near future.

Please note, that the Iphone App does have a steep cost of 2.99 to download. Considering the cost of the subscription, it would have been nice to see this waived for members.

In short, many of us take in the bulk of our information through short articles on the web because of the lack of both time and attention span. It makes sense that the information hungry public will turn to condensed material to keep up with changing trends and ideas. Making services like GetAbstract an attractive alternative to sitting down and reading a full book.