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Crumble Study vs Blinkist — summaries of other books, or a course from yours?
Blinkist hands you a condensed version of a book from its catalogue — a short read or listen that someone else wrote after digesting the original. Crumble Study does the opposite: you bring a file you already have, and it becomes a course with a chapter-by-chapter outline, lessons written section by section, key-point cards, and a quiz after every section. One shrinks somebody else's book so you can skim it; the other expands your own material so you can learn it.
That means the choice is not really "which is better" — it is which job you are doing today. Deciding what to read is a triage problem, and summaries are a good tool for it. Getting a 300-page document into your head is a study problem, and a 15-minute summary is the wrong shape for that no matter how well written it is.
The short version
| Crumble Study | Blinkist | |
|---|---|---|
| Where the material comes from | A file you upload — PDF, EPUB, HTML, or Markdown, up to 80MB | A curated catalogue of nonfiction titles |
| What you get back | An outline per chapter, section-level lessons, key-point callouts, and quizzes | A short summary of the whole book, with audio |
| Covers your own PDFs, papers, internal docs | Yes — that is the whole point | No |
| Testing yourself | Quiz after each section, plus a custom quiz you can generate for a whole book | Not the focus |
| Reading experience | One continuous scroll per chapter, no page flips | Short summary units, made for one sitting |
| Pricing model | Pay-as-you-go credits: you are billed for the material you actually generate | Subscription to the catalogue |
| Offline audio | Not yet — the output is text you read in the browser | Yes, narration is a core feature |
What "a course" means here
The unit is the chapter, not the book. Upload a file and it is split into chapters automatically; you then choose what to generate — the whole book, only the chapters that have nothing yet, or just the ones you tick. Each chapter you generate comes back as a teaching outline plus lessons broken into sections, each with its own key points and a short quiz. You can pick the output language, and you can pick how long each chapter should be (standard for most material, in-depth for the hard stuff).
Once it exists you read it in a scroll-based reader: no page flips, no chat box to prompt, no blank cursor waiting for you to think of a question. You highlight as you go, mark chapters done, and if you want a harder test than the inline quizzes, you can generate a custom quiz — pick the number of questions and a time limit — over what you have read. There is also a concept map per book: the ideas the material teaches and how they connect.
When Blinkist is the better choice
We would rather say this out loud than have you find out after signing up.
You are deciding what to read, not reading it. Sifting twenty candidate books down to three is exactly what a catalogue of short summaries is for. Crumble Study cannot help here at all — it has no catalogue and no opinion about what is worth your time. Bring the book you already chose.
You do not have the file. Our input is something you upload and have the right to use. Commercial ebooks with DRM are not that, and we do not have a licensed library standing in for them. A subscription catalogue asks nothing of you: open the app, pick a title, start.
You want audio, and you want it polished. Professionally produced narration you can listen to on a commute is a real product, and we do not have it. Crumble Study output is text you read.
You want one flat price and no arithmetic. A catalogue subscription costs what it costs whether you read one summary or fifty. Our credits track the material you generate, so a heavy month costs more than a light one. Predictability is genuinely nicer; we traded it for "you only pay for what you actually put through."
What it costs
One credit is US$0.01, and generation is billed by real token usage — not per book, not per page. Before a job starts you see an estimate, it is held against your balance, and when the job finishes it is reconciled against actual usage, so the difference comes back to you rather than sitting there as a rounding error in our favour.
From the current estimator, an English document at standard length works out roughly like this:
| Material | Credits, roughly | At US$0.01 per credit |
|---|---|---|
| A 30-page report | 15–40 | US$0.15–0.40 |
| A 100-page document | 70–130 | US$0.70–1.30 |
| A 300-page book | 150–400 | US$1.50–4.00 |
The spread inside each row is mostly chapter count: thirty short chapters cost more than ten long ones, because every chapter gets its own outline, lessons, and quizzes. Picking in-depth chapters raises it; generating only the chapters you actually need lowers it. If you are not in a hurry, economy mode runs the job in the background at half price and emails you when it is done.
Signing up gives you 300 credits, which is enough to take a full short book or a long report end to end, plus an example course that is already generated so you can see the output shape before you spend anything.
The honest summary
If your problem is "there are too many books and I want the gist of them," a summary service solves it and we do not. If your problem is "this specific document is on my desk and I keep bouncing off page 60," a summary of a different book cannot help — you need the thing in front of you turned into something you can work through and be tested on. That is the only job Crumble Study does.
FAQ
Is Crumble Study a Blinkist alternative?
Only if what you actually wanted was to learn the material rather than skim it. Blinkist is a catalogue of short summaries you browse; Crumble Study is a generator that turns a file you already have into an outline, lessons, and quizzes. If your reading list is a pile of PDFs, papers, and internal documents that no summary service will ever cover, we are the closer fit. If you want the gist of a bestseller before deciding whether to read it, a summary service is faster.
Do I have to upload something?
Yes. There is no catalogue here — the material is whatever you bring. PDF, EPUB, HTML, and Markdown, up to 80MB per file, and it has to be content you have the right to use: your own notes, internal reports, papers, public-domain books, DRM-free ebooks.
How much does one book cost in credits?
Generation is billed by actual token usage, so it depends on length and how many chapters the file has. A 30-page report typically lands around 15–40 credits, a 100-page document around 70–130, and a 300-page book somewhere between roughly 150 and 400. One credit is US$0.01, and you always see an estimate before you start — it is held upfront and reconciled against real usage when the job finishes.
Can I try it without paying?
Signing up gives you 300 credits and an example course that is already generated, so you can read a finished result before spending anything. 300 credits is enough to take a short book or a long report all the way through.