Berlin startup Readmill this morning expanded its social e-book reading platform with some cool new cloud-based features for both sellers and consumers.
More specifically, the company is pushing two new free features that it says will enable readers who buy books from indie publishers and retailers to “enjoy the same convenient user flow offered by the likes of Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Apple”.
In addition, the company is disclosing today that they’ve raised an undisclosed amount of funding in a Series A round from Wellington Partners.
Already, the company offers a social digital reading experience, allowing users to highlight parts of an e-book, share them with friends and start discussions around them through commenting and liking. The new features are meant to ‘bridge the gap between buying and reading’ e-books, the startup says.
The service works with e-books in DRM-free, ePub format. It’s also available as a bookmarklet for Kindle users who want to sync their highlights.
The first new feature that it is launching today is dubbed ‘Library’ and essentially allows users to upload e-books to the cloud and make them readily accessible from anywhere, linking them directly to the Readmill for iPad app.
The second new feature is ‘Send to Readmill’, and basically enables users to transfer purchased e-books over to their accounts with a single click.
In conjunction with the debut of the new features, Readmill is announcing partnerships with a number of major independent e-book stores, including Leanpub, Readlists (a Readability project), Free-ebooks.net, Jottify, OR Books, Publit, Bibliocrunch, BookRix and A Book Apart.
Readmill was founded by Henrik Berggren and David Kjelkerud in October 2010 and earlier raised seed funding from Index Ventures and Passion capital, as well as angel investors luke Alexander Ljung and Eric Wahlforss (founders of SoundCloud) and Henrik Werdelin.
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