Straight from the app
Real screenshots, not renders
Rereader running on a Mac — the daily rotation, the review screen, and a library dressed in covers it fetched itself. Dark mode included.
Plug in your Kindle and Rereader saves every highlight you've ever made — then brings them back: five in your inbox each morning, a few more in a two-minute daily review. The best of Readwise classic, in a $19 app you own forever.
A real Mac app — download, drag, open · your highlights live in a database file you can copy · no account, no subscription, no terminal
Rereader running on a Mac — the daily rotation, the review screen, and a library dressed in covers it fetched itself. Dark mode included.
Rereader doesn't quiz you. Each day it deals a fresh hand from your whole library — weighted, shuffled, and paced so the books you love come back often and nothing gets stuck on repeat.
Every highlight carries a weight and a cooldown. Today's set is a fair weighted draw over your whole library — no rigid schedule, no "due" pile guilt-tripping you, and reloading mid-morning deals the identical deck.
Press f for more like this, x for less, space to move on. The quote is right in front of you, so there's nothing to "recall" and grade — Rereader tunes what returns and how soon, not whether you passed a test.
No single book may fill more than a third of a day's set, small libraries are paced so they don't burn through in a week, and two x's in a row quietly retires a highlight for good.
Whether they live on the device, in a Readwise export, or scattered across an old Notion backup — there's a path in, and every one of them is safe to run twice.
A tiny background watcher notices the moment a Kindle mounts — any Kindle, any volume name, Kindle Scribe included. It imports what's new, posts a desktop notification with the tally, and gets out of the way. No email forwarding, no browser extension, no cloud in between.
It also archives every version of your clippings file it has ever seen — because Kindles silently truncate My Clippings.txt when storage runs low, and by the time you notice, those highlights are gone everywhere else.
Drag the file onto the import page. Rereader speaks the format fluently: page and location styles, notes attached to the right highlight, bookmarks skipped, edited highlights merged into the longest version — even Kindles set to Spanish (Tu subrayado en la página…).
Leaving Readwise shouldn't cost you a decade of highlights. Export your CSV from readwise.io, drop it in, and everything comes across — titles, authors, notes, tags, colors, locations, and the original highlight dates.
Highlights once synced to Notion? Rereader parses those Markdown-per-book exports, every dialect of them, and rescues the lot.
A plain spreadsheet with text, title, author, note, tags, highlighted_at imports cleanly. If you can get it into columns, you can get it into Rereader.
Rereader answers the Readwise v2 API on localhost — same endpoints, same field names. Tools that push to Readwise, like KOReader, can point at Rereader instead.
Re-run any of them — same file, same Kindle, same CSV — and Rereader reports “0 added” instead of doubling your library. Import anxiety isn't a feature here.
The part of Readwise people actually miss. Rereader's digest draws from the same rotation as the app, sends itself on a schedule, and is set up in the app's Settings screen — a minute, once, ever.
Easiest: a free Resend account — their free tier covers a daily email many times over. Create an API key at resend.com/api-keys.
Prefer no third party? Any SMTP server works too (a Gmail app password is enough) — both are built in.
Open Rereader → Settings → Daily email. Pick Resend or SMTP, paste the key, type your address. Credentials live in a private file on your Mac — never in the database, and the app never shows them again.
Preview and Send-now buttons sit right under the fields. Preview renders tomorrow's email without sending anything or marking anything as seen.
Default is 8:00 in the morning; change it to anything. Rereader reschedules itself the moment you save.
Lid closed at eight? Still arrives. Macs wake briefly on their own all day, and Rereader sends the moment yours does — with retries for six hours after your chosen time. One email a day, never a skipped one.
Every morning, your best highlights come find you.
If what you use Readwise for is the daily resurfacing of your Kindle highlights — the classic product, not the Reader app — you're paying every month for something a local app does at least as well.
| Rereader | Readwise Lite | Readwise Full | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Price | $19, onceyours forever | $5.59/mo$67 every year | $9.99/mo$120 every year |
| Daily resurfacing + email digest | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Kindle import | Plug in USB — automaticworks offline, archives your clippings | Extension or email forwarding | Extension or email forwarding |
| Where highlights live | A SQLite file on your Mac | Their cloud | Their cloud |
| Works offline | Entirely | No | No |
| Readwise v2 API | Compatible — tools point at you | Theirs | Theirs |
| Full export | Markdown ZIP + JSON, one click | CSV / Markdown | CSV / Markdown |
| Reader (read-it-later app) | Not included — see FAQ | Not included | Included |
| If the company disappears | Nothing changes | Your library goes with it | Your library goes with it |
What resurfacing costs you
Cumulative spend over three years
Fair is fair: if you rely on Readwise's mobile apps, its hundred-plus cloud integrations, or the Reader app for articles and PDFs, Readwise remains the better fit. Rereader replaces one thing — Kindle-highlight resurfacing — and aims to do that one thing better, on your own machine.
$19
once. That's the whole pricing page.
No terminal, no dependencies, nothing to configure by hand. The first launch sets up everything itself — the always-on library, the Kindle watcher, the email schedule.
Requires an Apple Silicon Mac on macOS 12 or newer (Intel build on request). Your Kindle connects over its usual USB cable.
No — and that's deliberate. Reader is a read-it-later app for articles, PDFs and newsletters. Rereader replaces Readwise classic: the daily resurfacing of your Kindle highlights, the email digest, the library. If resurfacing is the part you'd miss, Rereader is for you.
No. Everything runs and stays on your Mac, and your library is a single database file — copy it and you've backed up everything (there's also one-click Markdown and JSON export). Outbound traffic is exactly two things, both under your control: the daily email through the mail provider you configured, and a one-time title-and-author lookup per book to fetch its cover (Open Library / Google Books, cached forever, off with one toggle). Your highlights never leave the machine.
That's the expected starting point. Export your CSV from readwise.io (they make this easy, to their credit), drag it into Rereader, and your full history imports — notes, tags, dates and all. From then on, the Kindle syncs over USB.
No flashcards, no grading. The quote is always on screen, so there's nothing to test. Rereader's engine is a weighted rotation: press f to see more of something, x to see less, and it adjusts how often each highlight returns.
Yes. Rereader serves the Readwise v2 API — identical endpoints and field names — so tools built for Readwise, like KOReader's highlight sync, work by pointing them at your Mac instead of readwise.io.
A download link for Rereader.dmg — a normal Mac app. Drag it to Applications and open it; the first launch creates your library and sets up the background services by itself. Nothing is hosted, metered, or license-key-gated, and the full source code comes with it. Updates arrive as fresh DMGs; your library carries over untouched.
The app, Kindle watcher and email scheduler are built on macOS launch agents today, so a Mac is required. The web app itself is Node + SQLite and runs anywhere, but only macOS gets the polished, supported experience.
Click export. You get a Markdown ZIP (one clean file per book) and a full JSON dump. No lock-in was ever the point — it's your reading life, not ours.
30 days, no questions. If Rereader isn't your thing, reply to your purchase email within a month and the $19 comes back. You keep your exported highlights either way.
“Reading furnishes the mind only with materials of knowledge; it is thinking that makes what we read ours.”
John Locke — the kind of thing worth seeing twice
Get Rereader $19 once