Readmill
Born 2011. Died April 2014.
Readmill, a social reading platform founded in Berlin in 2011, died in April 2014 following its acquisition by Dropbox. It was thirty-three months old. In its brief life it allowed readers to annotate, highlight, and share passages from digital books with a community of like-minded correspondents — a vision of reading not as solitary consumption but as quiet, ongoing conversation between strangers across texts.
Dropbox, having acquired Readmill’s team, did not continue the service. Users were given notice and the means to export their highlights — small mercies. The application was removed from sale. What had been assembled with evident care was set aside, and the shelves it had stocked went dark.
It is with a heavy heart that we announce that Readmill will be closing on July 1st, 2014. We're proud of what we've built, but we need to move on.
Acquired and neglected
Mourned by Mourned by readers, annotators, and those who believed the margins of a book were worth sharing.
Its spirit persists in the export files its users were permitted to keep, and in the unfulfilled promises of every social reading app that followed.