Wednesday, June 5, 2013

Readmill Aids eBook Discovery with New iOS Update and Secures New Partnerships

landing-main-27c6a0cf67c14f166887d7be54f59e97

Readmill, the popular German ebook reading app has just secured a slew of new content for its ecosystem. The company has signed off on deals that will bring over short fiction to its platform and make it easier for customers to buy the books and send them right to their Readmill account. The Atavist and Guardian Shorts are the two main companies that signed onto the platform, and when you buy the ebooks from their sites, you now have the option to read them within the Readmill platform.

Never heard of Readmill before? Henrik Berggren, the CEO and cofounder explained the essence of his company’s vision. “The big problem indie publishers and online bookstores stores face is that the process is very complicated. In most cases you have to email the book to yourself or employ Adobe Digital Editions. This method is bulky and alienates the very users these stores are trying to appeal to.  We have a program where ebook stores sell the content on their own site and then press the read on Readmill button and the books are instantly delivered to their accounts. We have been doing this for the last nine months now and continuously secure new partners to add great new content. As we grow as a company, more vendors express interest and come to us for the end solutions.

The Atavist and Guardian shorts specialize in easy to read short fiction and non-fiction. These often are books that have a small word count and are not a full and complete novel, often they focus on the big news items and trends in worldwide news. The new deals took only a few weeks to put together, because Readmill already had a preexisting relationships with them. Henrik mentioned, “We have been huge fans of the Atavist for a really long time and the Guardian is one of the largest newspapers in the UK and Europe. These two companies wanted solutions aside from the walled garden of Amazon, Kobo, and other companies. There are very few companies in our space that have ‘Buy it Now’ buttons, that send books directly to your phone or tablet, and that’s us. Really, these two companies are willing to experiment and in their own different ways and are at the forefront and bringing new ideas to the market.”

Readmill has not only secured two new content partners, but also signed up with the ebook gift card company, Livrada. This will allow patrons to buy ebooks from Atavist, Guardian, or any number of other partners to get free ebooks delivered to their account.

Currently, Readmill has a 13 person development team that is mainly focused on engineering and design. It is based in Berlin, Germany, and has been doing brisk business since 2011. It received early on investment from Wellington Partners and Index Ventures, two London based VC companies. Henrik wrapped up the interview, “They are both interested in the future of publishing, distributing books to users and content, discovery in different ways and helped us very early on to be successful out of the gate.”

Readmill Aids eBook Discovery with New iOS Update and Secures New Partnerships is a post from: E-Reader News

No comments:

Post a Comment