DailyLit: Classics of your choice via e-mail or RSS—and commercial titles are on the way
Book chapters via e-mail are nothing new, but the twist at DailyLit is that you can choose which Gutenberg-style classics you want e-mailed or made available to you via RSS. As reported by Reuters, the company claims to have signed up 50,000 readers, who have put in requests for 75,000 titles.
I typed “Dickens” into a search box and got 15 selections ranging from Great Expectations (231 parts) to Going into Society (6 parts). You can choose to receive your selections three times a week, daily or on weekdays—and even specify the time. Besides at least several hundred classics, some Creative Commons titles are available.
Random House alum is cofounder
“We are currently in discussion with a number of publishers about including some of their copyrighted works on DailyLit,” reports the FAQ, and that’s of no small significance since Susan Danziger, one of the cofounders, worked at Random House, according to a profile in Book Business. The more recent Reuters article says the first commercial books will hit e-mail boxes in several weeks, and that publishers are excited over the new format. E-book sales at around $54M a year are just a speck of the tens of billions p-book sales. Could the e-mail angle help make a big difference? Berlitz, Baen Books, Chronicle Books and E-Reads are among the publishers to participate in revenue-sharing arrangements, according to Publishers Weekly.
For busy people who want their literature in chunks, DailyLit could be just the ticket, especially if the commercials books cost less than $5, as the founders are hoping. Ideally, of course, we could all read books uninterrupted, but this is an intriguing alternative, especially for the PDA and cellphone generation.
Origins of the site
A press release quotes Susan Danziger: “We got the idea for DailyLit after the New York Times serialized a few classic works in special supplements a few summers ago. We wound up reading books that we had always meant to simply by virtue of making them part of our daily routine of reading the newspaper. The only thing we do more consistently than read the paper is read email. Bingo! We put together a first version and began reading War of the Worlds and Pride and Prejudice. We showed it to friends, added more books and features at their request, and presto, DailyLit was born.”
Now a literary agent-lawyer, she helped get a massive digitization project going at Random House. Her bio says she was “head of Business Affairs for both the Corporate Development Group and the Children’s Media Division.”
Her husband, Albert Wenger, another cofounder (same as the venture capitalist and former president of del.icio.us who holds a Ph.D. in Information Technology from MIT?), says in the release: “Our audience includes people like us, who spend hours each day on email but can’t find the time to read a book. Commuters, teenagers, mothers and business travelers are all great candidates for DailyLit. In a unique twist, we’re using today’s technology – email and RSS – to deliver books in a serialized format in which many classics were originally published – scene by scene, chapter by chapter.”
May 23rd, 2007 at 11:46 am
Well, if people can sell pre-sliced bagged apple pieces, why not pre-sliced free classic literature? Save you from having to put a bookmark in the book.
May 23rd, 2007 at 12:43 pm
[...] The books currently available are in the public domain or available under a Creative Commons license. Teleread tells the story behind the site and reports that DailyLit may soon be offering new titles from publishers. My guess is that there will be costs associated with new titles, but the currently available titles are free. [...]
May 23rd, 2007 at 5:38 pm
As far as I’m concerned this is one for the Museum of Just Not Getting It. A 600-page eBook weighs no more and has no greater volume than a 2-page excerpt. It’s just as convenient to open, you can move it to a PDA in one hit, and you can read as much of it as you want when you want. And it’s a lot easier to archive one file for re-reading later than 241 emails. Bill, if your reader program doesn’t support automatic bookmarking, then you need to get one that does.
50,000 readers? Crime and Punishment in 241 parts? I wonder how many of them will come back for a second volume. DailyLit is a solution that doesn’t have a problem. But maybe Gutenberg should start emailing out an eBook of the Month.
May 24th, 2007 at 1:47 am
Jon, I think you’re forgetting about the technical challenges of using PG. No big deal to you and me. But most of people on the Net can barely download and work with an e-book file–even one without DRM to clutter things up. Beyond that, perhaps some big publishers will distribute their books without DRM if they’re broken up into segments. So I see potential here. Thanks. David
May 24th, 2007 at 6:32 am
How can it be a solution in search of a problem if they have 50,000 readers?
May 24th, 2007 at 8:09 am
621.471 downloaded books for the last 7 days on Gutenberg.
75k isn’t that much compared to Gutenberg. They have 50k members because you need to register in order to get your book.
The idea itself isn’t half-bad, but the whole website shouldn’t focus on this. I guess we could cut ebooks in a whole lot of pieces and send them by e-mail too with Feedbooks, or even using Twitter
May 24th, 2007 at 8:56 am
I was busy writing a long reply that would show how PG’s download numbers don’t necessarily mean much, when I realised that would sort of undermine my point too.
Anyway, what I wanted to say is that there seems to be an interest in this service, which would suggest that it may not be a solution in search of a problem after all. Books as monolithical entities have their place of course, but the great thing about e-books is that you can mash ‘em up.
May 26th, 2007 at 3:59 pm
Jon, I was being gently ironic there. Sorry to have omitted the smiley
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