R
Memory & Knowledge

Readwise

Surface highlights, daily reviews, and Reader articles.

Works with: Claude DesktopCursor
Quick install
npx -y readwise-mcp

How to install the Readwise MCP server

Add this to your Claude Desktop MCP configuration:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "readwise": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": [
        "-y",
        "readwise-mcp"
      ]
    }
  }
}

Add this to your Cursor MCP configuration:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "readwise": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": [
        "-y",
        "readwise-mcp"
      ]
    }
  }
}

The Readwise MCP server lets Claude search across every highlight you’ve ever saved. Books, Kindle clippings, articles in Reader, podcast snippets. It’s the closest thing to a “search my reading history” tool that exists.

If you’ve been using Readwise for any length of time, you’ve probably saved thousands of highlights. The native Readwise UI lets you browse them. The MCP server lets Claude reason across them.

Why use it

The promise of Readwise has always been “your highlights, surfaced over time”. The daily review email is great. But the moment you want to actually find something, you’re scrolling through tags and search results.

Claude with the MCP server flips this. “Find every highlight I saved about pricing strategy.” “What did the books I read last year say about hiring?” Single prompt. The server queries Readwise. Claude synthesises across whatever comes back.

What it actually does

The community servers expose the main Readwise API endpoints: list books, list highlights filtered by book or tag or date, fetch your daily review, search Reader documents, get article highlights. Authentication is a token from your Readwise account.

Practical patterns:

  • “Pull every highlight I saved this month and group them by theme.”
  • “What did Atomic Habits say about identity-based habits? Use my highlights, not the original book.”
  • “Search my Reader articles for anything mentioning AI agents.”

Gotchas

The Readwise API has rate limits. Heavy queries (especially fetching all highlights for a large library) can take a while or hit the limit. The servers handle this gracefully but Claude may report partial results.

Highlight metadata varies. Books from Kindle have rich metadata. Articles from Reader have URL and author. Podcast snippets are sparse. Don’t expect perfectly uniform structured data.

For knowledge workflows, pair the Readwise server with ContextBolt. Readwise covers the books and articles you’ve read deeply. ContextBolt covers the social posts and threads you’ve bookmarked across X, Reddit, and LinkedIn. Together they give Claude a near-complete view of what you’ve consumed.

If you take notes in Notion or Obsidian, you can also build promotion workflows: “Find my best highlights from this month and add them to my Notion ‘Quote Library’ database.” Claude reads from Readwise, writes to Notion, in one prompt.

Also in Memory & Knowledge

Combine Readwise with ContextBolt

Readwise gives Claude one kind of memory. ContextBolt adds another: every tweet, post, and article you save across X, Reddit, and LinkedIn becomes searchable by meaning. Run both as MCP servers and Claude can pull from both layers in one prompt.

See ContextBolt →

MCP servers related to Readwise

All in Memory & Knowledge →

ContextBolt

Search your X, Reddit, and LinkedIn bookmarks from inside any MCP client.
M

Memory

Anthropic's official knowledge-graph memory server with persistent entity storage.
S

Sequential Thinking

Anthropic's official structured thinking and reasoning helper.
m

mem0

Open-source memory layer with vector search across past interactions.

Readwise MCP server: FAQs

Is the Readwise server official?

No. Readwise hasn't shipped a first-party MCP server yet. The community implementations wrap the public Readwise API and work fine for most read use cases. Watch for an official server later in 2026.

Does it cover both classic Readwise and Reader?

Yes. Both APIs are exposed. You can query book highlights, article highlights from Reader, and your daily review queue. Tag and category filters are supported.

What does it need to authenticate?

A personal access token from readwise.io/access_token. Read-only by default. The community servers don't expose write endpoints, which is fine since you usually want Claude reading your highlights, not creating new ones.

How does this compare to ContextBolt?

Different shape of memory. Readwise is for long-form reading: books, articles, PDFs. ContextBolt is for short-form social: tweets, Reddit threads, LinkedIn posts. Most knowledge workers want both. They cover different halves of the same problem.

Can it write to my Readwise account?

Most community servers are read-only. If you want to push highlights into Readwise (from Claude conversations, for example), you'd need to wrap the create endpoint yourself. Most users don't need this.

Back to all MCP servers