Readmill

The Berlin e-book reader that put your highlights in the margin for other people to see, bought by Dropbox for its team and closed within three months

Acquired & killed
19902026

Readmill was an e-book reading app from Berlin, founded by Swedes Henrik Berggren and David Kjelkerud, that launched in beta on the iPad in February 2011. Its idea was social reading: your highlights and notes lived in the margin, other readers could see and reply to them, and a Send to Readmill button let publishers and shops deliver DRM-free books straight to the app. Dropbox bought the company in March 2014 and closed the service on 1 July 2014.

Timeline [edit]

  1. 2011
  2. February 2011 Launch
    Readmill for iPad opens in beta

    Social highlights in the margin.

  3. 2012
  4. March 2012 Feature
    Send to Readmill

    Publishers and shops deliver DRM-free books straight into the app.

  5. 2013
  6. January 2013 Version
    Readmill for Android
  7. 2014
  8. 27 March 2014 Acquisition
    Dropbox buys Readmill

    About $8 million, mostly for the team.

  9. 1 July 2014 Shutdown
    The apps stop working

    Export was open until this day.

The site through time

Read the old front page here, in one piece, from our own capture: readmill.com, 14 May 2013 →

Browse readmill.com as it was, via the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine:

2011 2012 2013 2014 Full archive →

Ownership [edit]

Readmill Network GmbH 2010–2014 Founded Henrik Berggren and David Kjelkerud, Berlin
Dropbox 2014–2014 Acquisition Bought for the team; the apps were closed

Why it shut down [edit]

Official line: Dropbox bought Readmill at the end of March 2014 in a deal reported at around $8 million, almost all of it for the eleven people. The apps stopped working on 1 July 2014 and readers were given until then to export their books and highlights.

Our analysis: Readmill was loved by the people who used it and that group never got big. It read only DRM-free ePub and PDF files, which meant none of the books most people bought from Amazon, Apple or Kobo. Its answer was to be the reader that publishers and small shops sent their files to, and a couple of hundred partners did, but the book trade was consolidating around Kindle and a social layer on top of reading is not something readers pay for. When the money ran low the most valuable thing in the company was a small team of good product designers from Sweden, and Dropbox paid for exactly that.

History [edit]

Reading with the margins open

Readmill started in Berlin in 2010 as a reading app with an opinion. Berggren and Kjelkerud, both Swedish, wanted the book on the screen to be as quiet as paper and the margin to be alive: you highlighted a sentence, you could write a note on it, and anyone else reading the same book could see the highlight and answer. The iPad app went into beta in February 2011 and the iPhone and Android versions followed. The typography was careful and the app won design praise well out of proportion to its size.

The business idea was a button. Send to Readmill let any shop or publisher push a purchased ePub into a reader's library, so small publishers and DRM-free stores used it as their reading app instead of writing one. Readmill signed up a few hundred of these partners. It did not, and could not, open books with Adobe or Amazon DRM, which kept most mainstream purchases out.

Acquired and closed

On 27 March 2014 the founders wrote that Readmill was joining Dropbox and that the service would close. TechCrunch reported the price at about $8 million, mostly stock, with the eleven-person team moving to San Francisco. Readers could export their books, highlights and notes until 1 July 2014, when the apps stopped working. Dropbox never released a reading product; the team went into its Carousel and document work.

The domain today

readmill.com shows a short farewell page and nothing else.

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Sources [edit]

  1. Confirmed: Dropbox acqui-hires social reading app Readmill TechCrunch 28 March 2014 [archived]
  2. Dropbox buys Readmill The Bookseller 28 March 2014 [archived]
  3. readmill.com in the Wayback Machine Internet Archive 1 April 2014
  4. Comparison of iOS e-reader software Wikipedia 1 January 2024 [archived]

Last verified: 22 August 2026. Spotted an error? Suggest an edit (corrections with sources are reviewed and applied).