Readmill

» see readmill.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

the first time i heard about readmill was techcrunch in 2012, and i never signed up. it was a berlin ebook-social-reading app, ios-first, aimed at people who wanted to underline passages in what they were reading and see the underlines from the people they followed. that was not a shape of reading i needed. my reading in 2011-2014 was kindle for anything in english and paper for anything in turkish, no social layer above either.

henrik berggren and david kjelkerud founded readmill in stockholm and moved the company to berlin during the beta. it launched publicly in december 2011 as a free ios app that opened EPUB files from dropbox or a URL. the reading interface itself was clean minimalist, black text on white or sepia paper, no chrome. the social layer sat behind the reading. when you highlighted a passage the highlight was public by default and pushed to your readmill feed, where the people who followed you could see it and comment inside the same passage.

the design philosophy that berggren wrote about at the time was that reading was already an intimate activity and the sharing had to be low-friction or nobody would do it. every operation was one tap, no dedicated post-writing step. this pattern predated by about eight months the kindle's own social highlights feature and by three years the shape that goodreads would eventually adopt for kindle integration.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ what it was ~

the technical stack was underrated. readmill parsed EPUB and PDF in the client, synced highlight positions across devices at the character offset rather than the page offset, so a highlight made on ios showed up in the exact same passage on android where the pagination was different. that character-offset sync was hard, ebook-format-specific, and worked in practice. adobe digital editions in 2013 could not do what readmill did for a book that was under active reading on two devices at once.

android app landed in early 2013. an integration with feedbooks let users load public-domain books directly into readmill without transferring files. by late 2013 the app had around 250k downloads globally, small numbers by publisher-app standards but a real audience for a social-reading indie startup. venture funding through 2013 was around $2.5 million from wellington partners plus passion capital.

~ the funny part ~

dropbox announced the acquisition on 27 march 2014. the deal was public quickly through techcrunch and reported at around $8 million, mostly in dropbox stock plus a small cash component. the framing was pure acquihire. berggren and kjelkerud with the small berlin team would move to san francisco and join dropbox's core product organization. the readmill app itself was not being kept.

the funny part was what dropbox wanted them for. dropbox at that point was trying to add a documents-and-productivity layer to what had been a pure file-sync product. mailbox had been acquired a year earlier in march 2013 and hackpad landed weeks after readmill. carousel had been built internally through the same window. dropbox was buying reading and writing tools with the intent to embed content-consumption experience inside its file storage. none of that strategy survived. mailbox and carousel both shut down in early 2016. readmill's team dispersed into other dropbox projects and eventually left the company.

~ what it became ~

readmill users were given 90 days to export their highlights and download EPUB files. the export produced a JSON file per book plus the original EPUB, which was the cleanest possible farewell for a reading service. the app itself was pulled from the app store on 1 july 2014. the domain redirected to a farewell letter for a few years, then quietly went to a parking page.

the pattern that readmill invented was mostly absorbed by kindle and by goodreads. amazon's own social highlights feature grew into the "popular highlights" that show up in kindle books today, aggregating what other readers marked. goodreads, which amazon had bought in march 2013, evolved into the reader-community layer above the reading experience but without the mid-passage sharing that readmill had specifically designed. the character-offset sync tech that readmill built is still not standard in ebook readers, ten years later.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »