PressReader was originally NewspaperDirect, founded in 1999 by Alexander Kroogman, Anatoly Karachinsky, and Esther Dyson. NewspaperDirect sought to give travelers access to their hometown newspaper, by allowing copies of current issues to be printed anywhere in the world.
In 2003, NewspaperDirect launched its all-you-can-read service, PressReader. Though PressReader was early to the market (smartphones and tablets weren’t yet a thing, and very few people were aggregating media at that point), it soon became clear that the idea was a good one. NewspaperDirect rebranded as PressReader in 2014. Since then, PressReader has grown rapidly, from just 100K MAUs to more than 12M MAUs today — and accelerating quickly.
PressReader’s proprietary technology makes it possible to process thousands of newspapers every single day, extracting text and images and making articles instantly translatable, searchable, and easy to read on mobile devices. No one else has managed to pull this off. Today, PressReader’s all-you-can-read service is popular with individual subscribers and business partners alike. And as we like to say at PressReader, it’s just the beginning.
PressReader is on a mission to improve the way people discover stories that matter.