Our Mission

We love great stories.

We think everybody should be able to share one with fellow human beings.

We are a research lab developing software for easing the tasks of creating, distributing and enjoying digital contents.

We currently focus on multilingual eBooks and Audio-eBooks with synchronized audio/text.

Our History

ReadBeyond was founded in July 2013 as a limited liability company in Padua, Italy. The original founders were Paolo Bertasi, Alberto Pettarin, and Simplicissimus Book Farm S.r.l..

ReadBeyond won the 2014 Librinnovando Award, the prize of the Italian Publishers Association for innovative ideas in digital publishing.

At the beginning of 2015, ReadBeyond published on GitHub the source code of its two main projects: the app Menestrello and the automated audio/text aligner aeneas.

To date, ReadBeyond has been the largest provider of Audio-eBooks in EPUB 3 reflowable format with audio/text synchronization (EPUB 3 Media Overlays).

In June 2015 the founders agreed to liquidate the company, transferring all its assets back to Alberto.

The ReadBeyond Web site and projects are currently being maintained by Alberto Pettarin, the (former) CEO and Head of R&D.

He loves eBooks, algorithms, and anything in between. In his spare time, he likes reading, cycling, and writing free software.

He holds a Ph.D. in Theoretical Computer Science from the University of Padua, Padua, Italy.

(He usually does not speak about himself in third person.)