When you help to unglue a book, you also help to make it available in an open format: DRM-free EPUB. One reason that’s important is that openness makes the book more valuable to everybody. You can do the things that you expect to be able to do with real books- highlight and clip passages, read privately, read untethered to the internet. You can do the things you expect to be able to do with digital stuff- search and analyze, link and reformat. But there’s a whole world of new things that we’ll be able to do when our book collections are DRM-free and open. We’ll need tools to do those things. Connections to social networks, for example. Full-featured book editing environments, for another.

The Unglue.it team gets excited when we see people starting to crack open the possibilities inherent in open, DRM-free ebooks. And that’s what Readmill is trying to do. So when Henrik at Readmill asked us if we might implement their “Send To Readmill” button, we put 2 and 2 together and made 5. If you go to the homepage for one of our “unglued” books, such as Oral Literature in Africa, and click on the “Download” button, you’ll see a “Send To Readmill” button after the list of download types. When you click the button, Readmill syncs the ebook automatically into your Readmill library, which is synced automatically onto your Readmill App on your iPad. We also enabled Send To Readmill for the Project Gutenberg titles in our database, such as The Hunting of the Snark.

So if you haven’t tried Readmill, yet, go try it. Maybe you’ll get some great ideas of new ways to use unglued books. Sometimes the biggest innovations aren’t technical, they’re social.

You may notice lots of little improvements in Unglue.it as we start moving the stuff we’ve been working on for the last month or so into production in preparation for our relaunch. We’re planning out the schedule for that now. Become a registered ungluer now to be one of the first to know the details.