Imprint App Review - Book Summaries & Quick Courses

Imprint (ios, android) won Google Play's app of 2023 award and got loads of attention this year. How good is it actually and what's the best way to use it?

What is Imprint?

Book summaries as a service is hardly a new idea. There's Blinkist, Headway, 12min and dozens of other similar services. What sets Imprint apart is their rather simple approach of slideshow like presentation and beautiful design.

Instead of text or audio summaries Imprint teaches through small chapters that consist of 10-20 presentation slides. Each page slides in with 1-2 sentences of text and a matching illustration. Every now and then there's a small multiple-choice quiz to help solidify what's learned. It's very simple but it kinda works.

This teaching style aligns well with the current trends of minimising friction in learning however as a stand-alone tool it's not great at retention and depth. So, for best results it should be combined with other tools like notes and flashcards for memory retention and chatGPT for digging into specific details.

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As for Imprint price it's $99.99/year (7 day trial) & ~30% discount is often offered after initial trial. For this price at the start of 2024 Imprint offers over ~100 book summaries and 2 courses.

Overall, paying the price of a video game for a year of Imprint makes it a very reasonable deal!

Imprint's Content

Imprint covers mostly popular growth books like Atomic Habits, Sapiens, Art of War. All of which are the usual suspects when it comes to book summary apps.

Through "Learning Paths" Imprint also curates a collection of these books centred around a single goal like "Be More Productive" or "Succeed in Business".

Where Imprint really shows off is in their courses which follow the same format but are actually full courses by credited educators made up from dozens of units.

Currently there are only two courses but both of them are surprisingly good!

Though, due to short-form presentation format they tend to miss some details here so it's not something that can replace your studying material on it's own.

I've been going through "Essential Philosophy: Theories and Thinkers" which is described as 80 day course but you could probably go through it in a week if you wanted to. At times I feel like I disagree with the choices of what to include in the summary - the chapters on Stoicism were wildly unimpressive for me as a modern day Stoic. However, most of the times it feels like it's covering all the right things.

Another course that I've tried is "Interpersonal Dynamics: The Psychology of Human Relationships" which covers how human relationships work and I've found it more consistent but that's probably because I know more about philosophy than psychology.

Unfortunately there are only 2 courses and they're not even finished yet. 

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Overall the content is great and well designed but at times it can be restricted by the short-form delivery method. There's a lot of difficult editing taking behind the scenes that decides what ends up in those 10 slides though overall the editors are doing a really good job.

That being said, it's best to supplement Imprint with other tools like notebooks and research assistants. Let me show you my favorite setup!

Best Way to use Imprint

The best way to use Imprint is the one that you can stick to but if you're looking to supplement the app a bit here are some extra tools.

To start, Imprint has 2 main issues that can be alleviated by extra tooling:

• information retention - there's not enough repetition. 
• information depth - it's summary app, they can't cover everything.

To fill in these gaps I found it's best to pair Imprint with:

• Flashcards 
• Bullet point notes (summarise the summary 😶)
• Wikipedia or ChatGPT 

Obsidian is great notes tool that also supports flashcards (through spaced repetition plugin). So, I tend to follow along with bullet points and add a flashcard or two and clear up confusing parts with a bit of extra research through chatgpt or wikipedia.

This makes for a really a pleasant study experience! 

Is Imprint Worth it?

I give Imprint a solid rating of 4 stars. It's a beautiful tool with a new novel presentation format but there's no desktop client, the UI is lacking and there's not enough content for a yearly subscription.

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Sometimes the courses end abruptly with "notify when more is available" mid-way and there's no way to see the whole catalogue. I've emailed Polywise (makers of Imprint) to get real content numbers and they replied with a pretty clear "no" which doesn't inspire much confidence:

For now, we generally can't provide the number of books and courses as we're releasing new ones all the time.

With all that being said, all of these issues can be easily solved by Imprint in the future so I'm looking forward to revisiting this review in the future! 

Technical Notes:

I've tried running the APK on linux desktop using Waydroid and unfortunately it keeps crashing after login. If you had better luck let me know!