The Times: Uptime: the app that helps you appear well-read (without actually reading)

No time for those big books everyone talks about? With a new app you can grasp Hawking, Piketty and Gladwell in five minutes. Harry Wallop tried it

ow many books did you read last year? I felt completely inadequate for managing no more than 11, a tally depressed by all the hours I spent glued to Netflix, Twitter and government press conferences that recorded the dead and dying. It was not a good year. But it turns out this figure puts me into the “heavy reader” category, as classified by Kantar, the market research agency that tracks consumer habits.

Just 35 per cent of Brits read ten or more books a year and about half the UK population (47 per cent) read none at all. This year I have vowed to do better. And it’s going well. So well, in fact, that I have surpassed my 2021 total before I’ve even got to the end of January 2022. I polished off three books yesterday, and we’re not talking slim novellas — some of these were hefty, serious tomes written by Bill Gates and Henry Kissinger.

If you are sceptical as to how — with the distractions of children, dog, smartphone addiction, daily Wordle challenge and a job — I can race through so many books in such a short space of time, you are right. I cheated. Or rather, to use the parlance of the age, I relied on a “knowledge hack”, an app called Uptime.

The idea is that instead of picking up the actual book, you open Uptime on your smartphone, browse through the 3,000 different titles, all of which are non-fiction, and click. You then have two options. You can either read the “hack”, which is the book crunched down to 1,200 words including a few “favourite quotes”. Or you can “watch” the book — which is the book, in effect, turned into a PowerPoint presentation, broken up with the occasional one-minute video of the author, a diagram or little illustration. The books are reduced to an overview, “three key insights” — each one of which is expanded upon with seven or eight separate slides — and a “take action” section before you get the final “wrap up”.

Including watching the little videos, it took me 10 minutes and 23 seconds to gallop through John Bolton’s 592-page The Room Where It Happened, his critique of the Trump presidency. The Exponential Age by Azeem Azhar — 352 pages about how Google, Facebook and other tech giants are growing faster than society can contain them — took me 6 minutes and 49 seconds.

To many this will sound like the most joyless possible way to consume a book, reducing fascinating biographies or engrossing philosophical works to a few sentences: Heidegger as fridge magnet; Long Walk to Freedom shortened to an Instagram post. To others bite-sized nuggets such as these may seem invaluable:

18 big books ‘uptimed’ into three key points

The Interpretation of Dreams
by Sigmund Freud
1 Dreams always aim to fulfil our deepest desires but often camouflage them.
2 The content of your dreams can originate from childhood memories, recent events or bodily stimuli.
3 Dreams are complex constructions of the mind that purposely displace content and rearrange it.

A Brief History of Time
by Stephen Hawking
1 The general theory of relativity changed the way we conceive of space and time.
2 Hubble’s redshift discovery proved that the universe is expanding.
3 Time can most likely only move forward, for three reasons.

Capital in the Twenty-First Century
by Thomas Piketty
1 The modern economy is founded on the principle of infinite accumulation of capital.
2 Fairytales about capitalism have not been borne out by history.
3 The economy can’t self-regulate and there are no spontaneous processes to prevent inequality.

And Away . . .
by Bob Mortimer
1 In every great double act there’s always a leader.
2 Sometimes it takes a brush with mortality to open new vistas.
3 The truth is often a good deal stranger than fiction.

The Republic
by Plato
1 You can’t say what’s just only for an individual or city — you have to look at both.
2 Cities, as well as human souls, can be divided into the same three distinct parts.
3 Being a philosopher and teaching others justice is like trying to pull people out of a cave.

Becoming
by Michelle Obama
1 Regardless of the changes in your world, you can strive to be your best and learn.
2 Ignore people who tell you what they think you can’t be, and push yourself to excel.
3 Don’t be afraid to try new things, even if you’re living in the White House.

She Comes First
by Ian Kerner
1 Not all paths to sexual climax are equal.
2 The clitoris, its location, and how to stimulate it are the key to the best sex of your life.
3 Don’t just think of sex in terms of foreplay and then intercourse, but foreplay, coreplay, moreplay.

Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race
by Reni Eddo-Lodge
1 Recognising systemic racism in Britain can be difficult if you don’t know its history.
2 To create a truly inclusive society white people have to talk about white privilege.
3 White people need to understand the intersections of oppression.

The Tipping Point
by Malcolm Gladwell
1 An idea spreads like fire once it reaches the tipping point.
2 Three kinds of people are responsible for getting ideas to tip.
3 If your idea isn’t sticky, it’ll never tip.

The Vindication of the Rights of Woman
by Mary Wollstonecraft
1 Women are just as valuable as men in society.
2 Girls and boys should have equal educational and other opportunities.
3 Equality between men and women will improve society as a whole.

Reasons to Stay Alive
by Matt Haig
1 Get out of your own head by doing some reading.
2 Even some of the greatest leaders in the world have experienced mental illness, which does have some benefits.
3 Recovery is possible, but won’t be as clear of a path as you might think.

Long Walk to Freedom
by Nelson Mandela
1 Education holds the key to freedom.
2 The only way to be remembered is to learn to challenge authority.
3 The most important time to practise is right after your biggest loss.

More Than a Woman
by Caitlin Moran
1 Modern feminism is both complex and simple.
2 Parenting teens means learning to step back.
3 On balance, joy wins out.

This Is Going to Hurt
by Adam Kay
1 NHS doctors are overworked and underpaid, which takes a toll on their personal lives.
2 Despite difficult working conditions, Kay saw being a doctor as the most fulfilling profession in the world.
3 A tragic accident during a C-section caused Kay to leave the medical field for good.

Taste
by Stanley Tucci
1 Tucci’s Italian-American roots cemented his love of food.
2 Food on film sets is a different experience.
3 For two years cancer treatments impeded Tucci’s ability to eat and enjoy food.

12 Rules for Life
by Jordan B Peterson
1 For a healthy psyche you must try to cultivate faith in being.
2 Morality beats pleasure.
3 We build things up, then they fall apart.

Thinking, Fast and Slow
by Daniel Kahneman
1 Our behaviours are governed by two systems of thinking.
2 Our beliefs are structured by memory and narrative sense-making.
3 Our two systems of thought produce two entwined selves.

Fear: Trump in the White House
by Bob Woodward
1 Trump struggled to see the advantages of a relationship with South Korea.
2 For Trump, even countless pages of data couldn’t prove the benefits of free trade.
3 Trump refers to his Twitter account as his “megaphone” to speak to the public.

Manifesto
by Bernardine Evaristo
1 The prospects for black, female and non-binary writers were very different in previous decades.
2 A high-profile prize doesn’t change you. It enables you.
3 Maintaining a positive mental attitude really can be self-fulfilling.

Uptime is not the first book summary app on the market. There’s Blinkist, Instaread and Microbooks, but Uptime is the first one really to push the idea you can “spend your downtime feeling accomplished”; books are there to give you insights.

“But I’m not sure why you want to condense a book. Reading is a process and a pleasure that you can’t condense into a ‘takeaway’ — what a contemporary word,” he says.

Reading great novels may be a pleasure, but the books that Uptime mostly focuses on are those you find in an airport WH Smith or the “big think” section at the front of Waterstones: Steve Jobs’s biography; The Art of War; Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow; anything by Malcolm Gladwell. The sort of books that busy chief executives like to claim they are reading on their holiday yachts. Aren’t they, precisely, the books that could do with being simplified and reduced to a few key points? “For me the best non-fiction is continuous with fiction,” Moran argues. “It uses the same techniques of structures and plotting, tone of voice, pacing. If it can be reduced to 1,200 words, should it even be a book in the first place?”

This is a good point, but one ignored by many publishers. Even voracious readers can become overwhelmed by the sheer volume of biographies, histories and supposedly groundbreaking works about the planet, our health and sex lives that come out every month.

This is the view of the Uptime co-founder Patrick Walker, 54, a former Facebook and YouTube executive. “There’s a lot of pressure. People have limited time but people have a lot of information overload as well.”

He freely admits that, as a former Silicon Valley exec, he might have contributed to that pressure. “I felt a real tug as a parent of four kids, as an individual, that I wanted to commit myself to help solve some of these pain points: this lack of time, short attention span, lack of resources, information overload.”

We speak over video — he splits his time between Lisbon, where his wife and children are based, and London, where Uptime has its offices. With his theatrically thick scarf, baseball cap and easy Pacific Northwest manner he looks as if he should be running a juice company rather than an app. But the American has spent most of the past 20 years based in London working for big tech companies; before that he was a TV producer in Tokyo, making documentaries, and spent time at the BBC, helping to run its Tokyo bureau.

The app, he says, is for two groups of people. The first are those who just don’t read. The 47 per cent of Brits who did not pick up a single book last year, many of them highly intelligent consumers who for whatever reason don’t like books. “But who nonetheless feel this sort of knowledge fomo [fear of missing out] and they want to be part of the conversation,” Walker says.

The second group are readers who stress about not finishing their ever-growing pile of books. There is even something called the Hawking Index, which measures how much of a book someone reads before giving up — named in homage to Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time, supposedly the most unread book of all time. “People buy these books as a signal to themselves, maybe to put on their shelf,” Walker says. He wants to help people whizz through books that might score highly on the Hawking Index. “It’s an opportunity to graze in categories that people wouldn’t necessarily go out and purchase. Thomas Piketty’s Capital is 900 pages and 15 hours’ reading. Will I buy it? Maybe not. But I sure may want to talk about that at the dinner table if somebody else brings it up.”

Aah, so Uptime is about helping you bullshit over a plate of lasagne at your neighbour’s. Do authors object to their works being condensed into the equivalent of Spark Notes for dinner parties? “As a journalist by training it would be dishonest of me to object to the idea of acquiring dinner party-level knowledge,” says Oliver Burkeman, laughing. “I’ve spent decades of my life doing exactly that.” His book Four Thousand Weeks was published last year to good reviews; this paper said: “It examines the human struggle with intelligence, wisdom, humour and humility.” It’s about how most of us have just 4,000 weeks on this planet; we should enjoy our time, not stress about ensuring it is productive.

I presumed he’d be appalled about his book being on the app. Uptime, after all, is the antithesis of his philosophy. But Burkeman is remarkably relaxed. “I guess I should be insulted, but it’s a compliment in some ways that someone wants to summarise the book.” Though he can see the value of book summary apps in giving you dinner-party chat, he is dubious about Walker’s claim they can be a great productivity aid. “If you manage to consume the main facts from 100 books instead of five books in the course of six months, will you feel more on top of your reading? Your potential supply of books is infinite. So you’ll just feel more rushed. You will, if anything, only become more aware that there are more books out there that you’re missing out on.”

I spent a week on the app and “hacked” 15 books. Did I feel cleverer at the end? I’m not sure I did. The “hacks” were a great introduction to the books but at no stage did I feel I was “reading” them. I missed the author’s tone of voice, and the fact that every idea was stripped down to an “insight”, without any of the examples or anecdotes to bolster that insight, felt very reductive.

The moment I stopped trying to learn from the “insights”, however, and saw the app as a glorified afternoon in a good bookshop, I enjoyed it far more. I even ended up buying one of the books. Inadvertently Uptime may help me increase my book total this year.

The Uptime app is available on both Apple and Android devices