When Readmill announced it was acquired by Dropbox and that it would cease operations on 1 July 2014, I was as sad and disappointed as when Sparrow was bought by Google. The Readmill app had quickly become my favourite reading app on the iPad, having a lovely, elegant interface with beautiful typography and just the perfect amount of surrounding controls. The Highlight feature, in particular, was very well implemented and I found myself using it a lot.

Thankfully, even the export tools have been well designed, and I could download all my reading history and preserve all the highlights I had made over time in various books. But I was curious to see what would happen to the iOS app after July 1. Somehow I’d missed this FAQ in the Epilogue post over at Readmill:

Can I continue using the Readmill app?

You can, but we do not recommend it. The app will not be updated or supported after July 1, 2014, and we’d like to help you transition to another service now.

Well, despite the lack of updates or support, I still think Readmill is a very useful and elegant eBook reader, and I’m still using it.

George Orwell’s collection of Essays successfully imported just a few days ago

Of course, since the underlying service doesn’t work anymore, you can’t sync your library, or make highlights, or connect to any of the social features of Readmill. The only thing that works is the book reading part — you can still import ebooks into the Readmill app locally via iOS’s “Open in…” feature. (All the books you imported in Readmill before the service closed retain your reading history and all the highlights you made.)

Perhaps for many people this is not enough, but if you only care about reading ebooks in your iPad or iPhone through an interface which, in my opinion, is better than Apple’s iBooks app, then you might want to keep the Readmill app installed on your device.