Dropbox Acquires Readmill

Reading groups have been around since, well, books have been.  People can gather together and discuss a particular book, which they have previously chosen to read and then they can discuss the characters, the plot, the premise, whether the author pulled off the characters well enough for the story to be believed?  You name it and people can discuss it.

But, some view book reading as a very private matter and they don’t want it to be discussed at great length at all.  What about online social reading?  Is the ability to read socially a thing which interests people?  Could creating a social setting for books be distracting?

Readmill was looking to change people’s way of thinking and push it positively forward by introducing a social reading platform. If you are unfamiliar with Readmill, the service was launched approximately 3 years ago and it essentially allowed users to add notes in a book that you have shared, to inform users of a particular passage, a funny quip, or something to keep an watch out for because it might be essential to the plot.

Dropbox was interested in Readmill and has now acquired the company, according to an official blog post on the Readmill website. “Our team will be joining Dropbox, where our expertise in reading, collaboration and syncing across devices finds a fitting home. Millions of people use Dropbox to store and share their digital lives, and we believe it’s a strong foundation on which to build the future of reading. We’re delighted to work alongside this talented team and imagine new ways to read together,” Readmill said.

This is Dropbox’s second acquisition in the last few weeks; the cloud storage platform announced that they would be acquiring a workplace messaging startup company, Zulip. Also, a couple of years ago in 2012, Dropbox announced the acquisition of Audiogalaxy.

It is unclear what Dropbox wants to do with Readmill, but for users of the Readmill service it is a sad time, as it will be shutting down on the 1st of July this year.

As always, if you would like to leave a sensible comment, then please do so in the comments section below.

[Image via teleread]

SOURCE: http://www.ubergizmo.com/2014/03/dropbox-acquires-social-reader-readmill/?utm_source=mobilerepublic