BERLIN – June 2012 – Readmill, a social and shareable reading platform, today announced the launch of Library and Send to Readmill, two new features that improve the buying and reading experience attached to independent publishers and retailers. Readers who choose to purchase from independent sources will now be able to enjoy the same convenient user !ow oered by the likes of Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Apple.Readmill allows users to highlight parts of an ebook, share these highlights with friends and start discussions around them through commenting and liking. Free with every Readmill account as of today, Library lets users upload their ebooks to the cloud and make them immediately accessible from anywhere. With an increasing number of people choosing to buy their ebooks from various sources, Library eliminates the current need to store them on your computer. It also links them directly to Readmill for iPad, ready for reading.
Send to Readmill, also launched today, is a button that works in conjunction with Library to get purchased ebooks into an account with one click – truly minimizing the amount of work a user has to do before they can start reading. Send to Readmill is a testament to the company’s philosophy that going from buying to reading should be one simple step, with ebooks being automatically sent to a user’s library after clicking the button on the post-purchase page of an ebook store.
Readmill announced partnerships with six major independent stores for launch. They also announced a partnership with Readlists, the latest project from Readability, which solidi#es them as a company interested in the development and variation of the ebook form. Partners for launch are:
Leanpub, Readlists, Free-ebooks.net, Jottify, OR Books, Publit, Bibliocrunch
“With Readmill we started with a great reading experience, but we quickly realized that getting to that experience took too much time and eort.” said Henrik Berggren, CEO of Readmill. “I’m very excited about this #rst step of many towards helping people get from buying to reading in one click. We have some really great partners already on board, and we look forward to helping them increase their readership and sell more books.”
Jack Lenox, founder of Jottify, said: “We’re making a number of steps to improve user experience on Jottify, and Send to Readmill is a fantastic addition that will provide a simple and seamless way for our community to get books into their Readmill accounts. Readmill is one of the best reading experiences out there, so we’re very glad to be a partner.”
Readmill also announced today that they have secured series A funding from Wellington Partners. The amount goes undisclosed. The funding will help power today’s launch, and allow Readmill to pursue their 2012 roadmap of features and further releases.
Daniel Waterhouse, partner at Wellington, said: “We are incredibly excited to be backing the Readmill team. As consumers shift to a digital reading experience we passionately believe in the power of a platform to bring readers, publishers and authors closer together in sharing their reading experiences. Readmill has created an agnostic platform and distribution channel to make this happen – coupled with the world’s best reading experience. They are in a position to be an ubiquitous part of everyone’s reading lives.”
About Readmill
Readmill is a curious community of readers, highlighting and sharing the books they love. Seamless integration with Facebook timeline and one-click share to Twitter and Tumblr means that starting, highlighting a passage, and #nishing a book is published to a user’s social graph. Activity is also published to a user’s Readmill followers. Users can like highlights and comment on them for the purpose of discussion, and a user’s entire reading activity is viewable as a personal pro#le page on readmill.com. With such exposure, Readmill actively promotes book discovery. Readmill also doubles as a platform, and its easy-to-implement API turns any reading app into a social experience with reading data, commenting and book recommendations.
Readmill is available as an iPad app from the App Store.
I love that idea and believe it might be the step that makes smaller independent ebook stores an equal alternative to the big players.
I would totally use it for the cloud storage, especially if it supports reading on multiple devices like Amazons Kindle. Unfortunately I am not so convinced by the “entire reading history viewable” on the website. Sure, it might help the discorvery of new books, and I could use an Alias, but I hope there is an opt-out option for that feature. I would prefer to chose individually what to share with the world and what not to.
This looks like great news for readers and authors alike! Thanks for sharing this. It’ll give hope to the smaller sellers for sure. And I agree with the previous comment – I hope that there’s an opt-out for the reading history!