Dropbox to acquire German reading platform Readmill

With fresh capital in its coffers, Dropbox appears to be on somewhat of an acquisition spree, albeit a quiet one. Following the cloud storage company’s recent purchase of workplace chat solution Zulip, it’s in talks to acqui-hire Berlin-based Readmill, the social and shareable reading platform. According to what we’re hearing, the deal value is around $8 million, made up of mostly stock but with a small amount of upfront cash for the startup’s founders who will be moving to Dropbox in San Francisco.

Readmill has been acquired by Dropbox and is now in the process of closing its reading platform. In a blog post, the Berlin-based startup said it was joining Dropbox to work on “new ways to read together”, suggesting that its original vision would still be the focus of its work. Readmill as we know it is closing though. Users can no longer create a new account and the Readmill apps will no longer be available from July 1, 2014. The company said it had “failed” to create a sustainable solution for reading and apologized for being unable to solve the many challenges surrounding ebooks. With Readmill, book-worms could consume their favorite ebooks and then share extracts with friends and followers. Highlights could be shared to external social networks too, but much of its appeal was arguably in its own homegrown community. “We considered every option before making the difficult decision to end the product that brought us together,” it said.