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Mobile Service Provider Aims to Transform into Your Personal Digital Library on the Go

A Berlin-based company, dotdotdot, has spent the past ten months developing a venture that could transform into your private digital library, encompassing texts from various sources. Access these texts effortlessly on your iPad, iPhone, or web-based PC, reading them in a clutter-free format....

Mobile service transforms into a digital library, offering books on demand for your smartphone.
Mobile service transforms into a digital library, offering books on demand for your smartphone.

Mobile Service Provider Aims to Transform into Your Personal Digital Library on the Go

In the digital age, managing one's own content in a private archive while still enjoying the benefits of a social reading platform has been a long-sought solution. Enter dotdotdot, a Berlin-based company that has risen to meet this challenge.

Originally a case study, dotdotdot's development was initially met with skepticism, but it quickly garnered support from many people. The project was born out of the belief that the workflow around digital reading feels broken and fragmented, with texts scattered across different devices and platforms.

At its core, dotdotdot is not a content seller or an advertising platform. Instead, it functions as a tool, software as a service, or platform. Users can get started by installing the company's browser-based plugin to harvest favourite blogs or import RSS Feeds via GoogleReader. The project allows users to read texts from various sources – webpages, blogs, articles – in a distraction-free format on devices like iPad, iPhone, or web-based PC.

Once imported via the company's browser or bookmarklet, the long-format text becomes clean and easy to read. There's a social element to the project, too, allowing users to see what their Twitter and Facebook friends are reading.

Dotdotdot does not function as a merchant or content distributor. Its focus is on filtering content, linking relevant contexts, creating a high-quality reading experience, and fostering an active community around texts. The innovation lies in uniting social reading features with as much content as possible without central hosting.

The CEO of dotdotdot, Thomas Schinabeck, believes that the best products are made by people who build a product for themselves and find it meaningful. He states that the true added values a reading platform should be able to deliver are these aspects.

There is competition in the cloud platform market that lets users import RSS and ebooks into a singular platform, storing notes, highlights, and annotations in the cloud. Notable examples include Instapaper and Readability, which launched in the last year.

However, dotdotdot stands out by offering a unique blend of decentralization and social reading, providing users with a personal digital library that consolidates ePub and internet texts. In doing so, it aims to be an independent place for digital reading, avoiding conflicts of interest between providing a good reading experience and maximizing profits.

In conclusion, dotdotdot offers a fresh approach to digital reading, providing users with a decentralized, ad-free, and socially-connected platform for managing and enjoying their content.

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