Sarah Moriarty, Blinkist’s director of brand marketing, has some ideas as to why it has worked.

“People tell us they feel overwhelmed by information overload these days,” she says. “Blinkist cuts through this noise and offers people clarity and direction when it comes to discovering new ideas and learning new things.”

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Its library of more than 4000 titles began by focusing on “argument-based non-fiction”, where the author had a clear message to share. But Blinkist and other apps have blurred that boundary by expanding into books with a strong narrative including memoirs, autobiographies and histories.

Some readers who initially recoiled at the idea of abandoning the author’s sacred words have since been converted. Writer Diane Shipley used Blinkist to pick up on the key insights in Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time. To her surprise, the download packed a lot of physics into 14 blinks.

“We have to get over the idea that spending hours in a mahogany chair, frowning over a leather-bound volume from 1623 is the best way to absorb information,” she wrote in The Guardian.

”And let’s be honest, some authors waffle on, whether because they were paid by the word or their agents were too polite to tell them to stop. Many more writers would benefit from being condensed – that’s the long and the short of it.“

But other readers are unlikely to convert. “People genuinely interested in a subject don’t want the content truncated,” says former bookseller Mary Dalmau, who ran the three largest bookselling outlets in Melbourne.

“They are reading about the subject because they want to find out all about it ... I wonder why I would be paying for that when I can walk into a bookstore, a library, or go online and read a blurb or a review or indeed a synopsis in the case of most non-fiction.”

Simon Clews, who trains academics in how to convey their ideas in books and articles for the general reader, is also a sceptic about the condensed-reading apps.

“Half the time, I don’t buy the whole time poor/too busy thing,” he says. “Far too often, it seems to be just an easy and lazy answer designed to bolster a sense of self-importance.

“If your level of interest in a topic runs to a few truncated grabs on an app, you’re probably not really that interested in it. I spend my days training and encouraging some of the world’s greatest minds to share their research in accessible and entertaining ways.

“With that on offer, why would you need to resort to poorly written, algorithm-driven summaries? For heaven’s sake, just go buy a book!”

Speed read

Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People, 18 minutes
Amy Chua’s Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, 10 minutes
Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J.Dubner’s Freakonomics, 16 minutes
Michelle Obama’s Becoming, 19 minutes
Edward Said’s Orientalism, 15 minutes
J.D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy, 13 minutes