It is always fascinating to see something you have thought about and cared about for a long time going live and Beta. Long-time readers of this blog know that I have a serious e-book affection. Like most people who read a lot of digital text, I crave for a nice way to manage large numbers of documents, share them with my friends, rate them, have them acessible and nicely formated on whatever device I choose to read them. Unfortunatelly, there has been no satisfying solution. Yet.

Two years ago I talked my good friend Andreas Steinhauser into doing something against the sorry state of affairs. A company was founded, financing secured, lots of software written by a marvelous team. I only could provide some advice and ideas, due to other commitmens.

And now its going live: txtr.com . The Beta is by far not feature complete, but you can already create collections for documents, bulk upload them and choose if only you, your friends or everybody can see and work with them. I especially like the online preview, so no downloading of 10 MB of PDF, only to find out its written in Medieval Elbonish. The user interface is drag & drop inside the browser, which makes everything nice and easy. (As I said, its still Beta, so don´t be too rude.)

There is much more stuff to come in the next months which I am unfortunatelly not authorized to disclose yet. But what I can tell you is that I can barely wait to get my hands on it.