How To Summarize a Book: Manual vs. AI Methods

Bad book summaries vary, but good book summaries are basically the same. A good book summary should include all main ideas in different, well-organized words without any redundancy.

This article provides a unique perspective on summarizing books, giving readers two strong options: using manual techniques or AI technology.

How to Write a Good Book Summary Manually

Writing a book summary is a daunting task, not to mention writing a good one. Here are the easiest-to-follow 3 steps to summarize a book.

Step 1. Read a book thoroughly

Unlike quick reading for a piece of college assignment, reading for writing a book summary requires deep understanding. That’s to say, you need to know all the characters, the relationships between them, and most importantly, the whole story. Professional writers recommend everyone who is writing a summary take notes while reading so that it would be easier to go back and check important information.

Step 2. Write a summary for each chapter

It is quite normal to forget about what each section is about after reading a book. Now, go through the book again and write a summary for each chapter so that it is easier to organize all the information of the book. By the way, do remember to create an independent chapter introducing all characters.

Step 3. Organize the information and write your summary

Writing a book summary doesn’t only mean listing all key information, but also combining them in logical order. It is better if the summary is in the same writing style as the original content.

If you find writing a book summary troublesome, then let technology help out! AI comes alive and makes analyzing and summarizing a breeze. It saves you lots of time and effort by streamlining your reading. In the following parts, we will show you how to summarize a book with the best AI summarizing tool, and some alternatives are also included. Let’s dive in!

The Best AI Book Summarzing Tool – PDFgear Chatbot

We recommend PDFgear Chatbot as the best AI book summarizer due to the reasons below.

To begin with, PDFgear Chatbot is integrated with the latest language processing model – ChatGPT 3,5. it is able to identify the key points and generate an excellent summary just like it is written by a human.

The whole process is easy and free of charge. Secondly, PDFgear Chatbot answers all your questions related to the book. Moreover, it gives you the link to the pages where all those answers are from. You can always refer to those pages for double check.

Step 1. Download PDFgear to your computer

Click the Free Download button to get PDFgear for free on your computer. Currently, PDFgear is only available on Windows 10 and 11.

Step 2. Upload your book

Upload your book by clicking the Open File button. If your book is not in PDF format, please convert it to PDF format with PDFgear first.

Step 3. Summarize your book using Chatbot

The Chatbot is analyzing your book right now. The whole process takes less than several seconds depending on how long your book is. After that, a generated book summary will be displayed in the right panel.

Instead, insert your query about the book into the Chatbot for a more targeted summary.

Alternatives to the Best AI Book Summarizer

There are loads of AI book summarizers on the market. We understand you may be craving more options. After careful comparison, we have selected some summarizing tools that are comparable to PDFgear Chatbot. All of them are easy to use and have shown their great power in generating book summaries.

The problem is that the following AI book summarizers have their own shortcomings and limitations. They may not be good for everyone. Check this list out and know more about those AI book summarizer alternatives.

# 1. ChatGPT

ChatGPT is the strongest language processing model so far developed by OpenAI. There are many reasons why you should try ChatGPT to summarize a book. First, you don’t need an e-book to get a summary. ChatGPT can collect the data related to the book and compose a book summary effectively. Besides, you can ask ChatGPT to generate a book summary in different tones, and lengths.

The limitation is obvious. ChatGPT will not be able to give you any information about books published after 2021. Moreover, ChatGPT may collect false information. As a result, you may get a summary with mistakes.

# 2. Scholarcy

Scholarcy, the best summarizer tool for scholars, identifies the key information of your book and turns them into short sentences. It even understands figures, tables, and images.

Besides generating a summary in flashcards, it also generates highlights. You can know all the key information while enjoying the wonderful parts of the book. Scholarcy also allows you to create a library. You can always come back and check the summaries you saved.

It may sound too good to be true, but Scholarcy charges users $9.9 per month. It won’t be a great deal if you are not a voracious reader.

# 3. Paraphraser.io

Paraphraser.io is a book summarizer based online with two summarizing tools. The first is Extraction Summarizer. This summarizing tool extracts keywords and phrases from sentences and join them together. The second is Abstractive Summarizer. It uses NLP to reproduce a long text into a shorter one. The meaning will be retained but the sentence structures will be changed. You can even choose to summarize your book in a bullet list in either tool.

Though Paraphraser.io claims to allow users to summarize for free, the fact is, you can only summarize 1500 words each time if you are in Abstractive Summarizer.

Conclusion

That’s all for how to summarize a book and some alternatives for the best book summarizer – PDFgear Chatbot. Now, use the book summarizer you find most interesting recommended in this article, and let it help you save lots of time before starting another time-consuming reading journey!

Still, we recommend PDFgear Chatbot. It is free and capable of generating book summaries and answering all your questions related to the book. It also provides you with numerous PDF editing tools to help you summarize books.