Isn’t that fantastic? Here is what Aldiko says on its blog: “Earlier this year, we announced that the Aldiko Book Reader free version has reached 5 million downloads. Hooray! We’re excited to announce that we have just passed another pretty big milestone. As of this Wednesday, the Aldiko Book Reader free version passed 10 million downloads! It has been an impressive 2012 for us. Aldiko users have more than doubled and over 20 million books have been read within the Aldiko Book Reader. We have users from over 200 countries and the Aldiko Book Reader has been translated to more than 20 different languages.”
How about a bit of history: Aldiko started up in 2009 and on June 2nd of that year, the company announced its product. It developed one of the first e-readers to support EPUB and started out with a partnership with Feedbooks. According to a review of the new reader published in The Gadgeteer on June 4, 2009, the developer said that the name is loosely based on the Swahili word for book, andiko.
I searched back in my Gmail account and found the announcement email from co-founder Tiffany Wong, which I received, on June 2, 2009, when I was writing for Teleread. It reads as follows:
Hello Paul,
My team has been working on an ebook reading application for the Android platform over the last few months. I am excited to announce that we are officially releasing our app today; it is available for download directly from the Android market.
We have full support for the EPUB format, including table of contents and full CSS styling. The reading experience is fully customizable (font/background color, font type, margin, night mode, etc.).
Also, we worked closely with Feedbooks to provide seamless access to their huge catalog of free content right from the app. We support the emerging OPDS distribution protocol, which means we’ll be able to add a vast collection of catalogs from other sources in the future, and we are working hard on making that happen!
We’ve all been closely following Teleread for a while now and would love to hear feedbacks from you and your readers.
For more details regarding our app, please check it out on our website: http://www.aldiko.com
For the official announcement: http://www.aldiko.com/blog/?p=9
Regards,
Tiffany Wong
Co-Founder – Aldiko
Paul Biba is a retired corporate international lawyer who has worked in 53 countries. Since he is a very fast reader he came to ebooks out of self-defense in order to avoid carrying a suitcase of books on his travels around the world. An early ebook adopter, he has read on Palms, Pocket PCs and practically every device that has been out there. After being a frequent contributor to TeleRead.com, the oldest ebook/epublishing blog on the net, Paul became TeleRead's Editor-in-Chief, a position he recently resigned. Send Paul an email to paulkbiba@gmail.com
