[6 min. read]

If you want to save time and money when it comes to reading books, you're in the right place! I'm an avid reader of books, but was looking for more efficient ways to boost my growth. I've spent many hours doing a complete analysis of ALL book summary sites, and will focus on this page on the BEST FREE ones I've found and tried. Read until the end to download the One-Page PDF Overview!

No free trial, but free forever!

When I say free, I really mean FREE FOREVER! Many sites offer a free trial but that only lasts for a week and those sites are not the focus of this page. Free websites mainly make their income by using ads, affiliate marketing or offering other valuable services.

How to distinguish FREE book summary websites?

The main criteria to distinguish between free book summary websites are:

• Summary Length: The amount of time it takes to read a summary ranging from 4 to sometimes even 30 minutes per summary.
• Amount of Summaries: Some websites only have 40 summaries, while others have more than 2000 and a much broader range.
• Medium of Summary: The variety in presentation formats (text, audio, video).
• Summary Structure: The approach to summarizing (comprehensive vs. main ideas, inclusion of personal opinions).

I didn’t include the types of books as a criteria, as they all contain an extensive range of non-fiction book summaries. Themes that most websites focus on are: Business, Marketing, Productivity, Motivation, Self-Improvement, Leadership, Psychology,… and many more.

How this page is organized

We have organized this review to suit your needs based on what’s available in the market! Pick the section that suits you best, and find the best websites.

• Best Short Free Book Summaries: For quick insights.
• Best Long Free Book Summaries: For in-depth understanding.
• Best for Personal Notes and Opinions: For opinions, or a long list of extracts that’s ideal when you have read the book.
• Best for Variety: For readers seeking variety, a list of website with the biggest amount of book summaries.

Within each section, the websites are ranked in order of preference. This means that the top-ranked website is recommended first, followed by the others in sequence.

Best Short Free Book Summaries

The best way to start building the habit of reading and learning every day.

Short book summaries focus on giving around 2 – 3 main insights per book and take about 4 – 5 minutes of your time. Despite the fact that they are not giving a complete summary of the book, they can be a fantastic way to boost your growth EVERY day with some key insights!

1. 🔗Four Minute Books: This website publishes every week a 4 minute book summary and a 5-8 minute youtube video of a book. Each summary contains 3 main lessons of the books. With a range of over 1200+ book summaries, the best place to start!
2. 🔗Productivity Game: This website has a limited range of +75 book summaries, but of great quality and also a one page PDF can be requested. On top of this, there is also a great youtube channel with qualitative book summaries in various themes.
3. 🔗Actionable Books: Despite only giving 2 insights per summary, this website has +1100 short text summaries and is a great place to continue your journey. This website doesn’t have audio or video, but a great source of daily insights.
4. 🔗Littler Books: These summaries are not structured in 2 – 3 main insights, but contain a long list of important phrases in the book. Their range is also rather limited to +100 summaries but definitely worth a visit.

I would recommend any of the 4 mentioned book summary websites above. All of them are a great source to build the habit of learning and improving every day.

Best Long Free Book Summaries

The best way to understand a book in depth and gather the important insights.

Long book summaries take around 12 – 25 minutes to read and really summarize a large part of the key points in the book. Sometimes you may even feel like you have really read the book. If you have mastered the habit of daily learning and are not afraid to invest some more time each day for learning, these book summaries are your go-to place.

1. 🔗QuickRead: With over 500+ book summaries, the summaries on this website fully represent the book and are structured in a good way. In their summaries you can find even inspiring short stories that inspire you. Next to a text summary, you can also get access to an audio version via their free app to listen on the go.
2. 🔗Sloww: Sloww claims to be your go-to book summary website for the highest quality and most detailed free book summaries anywhere in the world. Their pages are nice and clean and book summaries are highly structured and good. Main disadvantage is their limited range of book summaries (100+).
3. 🔗StoryShots: This website contains over 300.000+ summaries and also has an app version. The key points of the summaries are organized in 10 key points aka “10 Story Shots”. In this way they resemble the short book summaries, but with 3x as many insights. There are quite some ads on the website as this website is free, but if you go premium they will be removed. Next to text summaries, also audio and video are available!
4. 🔗Paul Minors: Paul Minors is a productivity blogger who has a nice repository of 75+ book summaries. His summaries are long but well structured and contain many insights.
5. 🔗The Power Moves: With over 590+ summaries, this website claims to have the largest collection of free full book summaries on the web. Their book contain a huge amount of book summaries, but they are less structured and don’t offer audio. For that reason I have put them last in my list.

Best for Personal Notes

Best to get a long list of insights and exact extracts from the book.

Despite being less structured, these book summaries contain valuable key notes of the people who have read the book. They contain mostly short phrases of the book itself, and sometimes also personal opinions. I would recommend to use these summaries in case you have already read the book, and want to have a quick recap. If you haven’t read the book yet, some extracts may be more difficult to understand. Despite of that many insights will be very interesting, but you may feel overwhelmed. All personal summaries take more than 10 minutes to read and would fall in the longer summaries category.

1. 🔗Jeremy Silva (30+ summaries): Jeremy starts his summaries with his thoughts, favorite quotes, and key questions to ask yourself based on the book. After that you will get key phrases and snapshots from the book that are well organized per chapter of the book. A pitty that there are so few summaries.
2. 🔗Samuel Davis (140+ summaries): Samuel starts his summaries with describing the book in 3 sentences, and giving the 5 big ideas of the book which is a great introduction! You immediately get a feeling of the main points in the book or main chapters. After that, the reader received a long, less structured, list of short snapshots or phrases in the book that provide valuable insights.
3. 🔗Nat Eliason (250+ summaries): Book summaries that start with the high level thoughts of Nat to already get a good feeling about the book in itself before you continue reading. His book summaries are an extensive (+10 minutes) list of phrases and interesting insights extracted from the book. Despite having a super long and great list of valuable notes, for some it would be great to have them explained in a kind of story for understandability.
4. 🔗GrowthHabit (35+ summaries): The owner of this website was inspired by Nat Eliason and decided to do the same. While these summaries are also very extensive, they are better organized in sections (book chapters sometimes). They also contain keywords, quotes, a personal opinion, book score, and clearly highlight who the book is for. The big disadvantage of this site is the high number of ads on each webpage.

Best for largest amount of book summaries

The best way to get variety and keep learning on 1 single website.

If you like variety and don’t like to switch platform a lot, it’s good to choose a platform that has an extensive range of summaries. Below the FREE Book summary websites with he largest range of book summaries. Choose the platform you like, and you are good for quite a while to fuel your reading habit!

1. 🔗StoryShots (+300.000 summaries): Longer summaries that contain 9 key insights per book!
2. 🔗Four Minute Books (+1200 summaries): 3 key insights per book in less than 4 minutes.
3. 🔗Actionable Books (+1100 summaries): Only 2 key insights per book in less than 5 minutes.
4. 🔗The Power Moves (+590 summaries): Extensive full book summaries, but less structured.
5. 🔗QuickRead (+500 summaries): Extensive book summaries that are well organized and written in a fluent way. Inspiring stories are included in their summaries.

My Personal Favorite

Personally I prefer the website QuickRead.com who contains long summaries (15-20 minutes) in text format, that contain the book structure and no opinions. I've set myself a personal goal to read 1 summary each morning during weekdays! In the weekends, I'll recap what I've learned during the week. What about you?

Get The PDF Overview

Click the button below to download the complete overview of FREE book summary websites in one view in PDF. This makes it easy to compare all options in one view.