When we wrote earlier about DailyLit, we expected that the site would go far beyond classics by e-mail.
Sure enough, the company has spiffed up its site and is offering installments of 30 books via email and RSS, at prices between $4.95 and $9.95. The home page is strikingly well organized and even includes reader comments.
Among the participating publishers are Perseus Books Group, Globe Pequot and Baen, the latter offering such books as In Fury Born, by David Weber.
Other titles range from Alan Dershowitz‘s Letters to a Young Lawyer to Jessie Shiers‘s The Quotable Bitch (nonfiction featuring Madonna, Hillary Clinton, etc.). Most of the hundreds of books on the site are still free: public domain or classics.
Let’s hope that, having sampled E this way, many people will move on to downloads from other e-stores and public domain sites. Meanwhile it’s great to see DailyLit experimenting this way. I hope that other stores and publishers follow. E-books need to break out of old paradigms.
(Oxford University Press‘s Evan Schnittman, via Publishers Lunch.)
Related: Oxford U. Press exec on E vs. P prices: Depends on the kind of reading
Technorati Tags: DailyLit , DailyLit.com , Evan Schnittman , Perseus Books Group , Globe Pequot , Baen , The Quotable Bitch , Jessie Shiers
Love the concept of reading bits of a book through RSS/mail. That’s obviously something we could easily add on Feedbooks too. We just need to divide the XHTML of our epub files into multiple elements…
This way, once you’ve finished the book, we could offer a way for the reader to keep a copy of it and it wouldn’t fragment the community between casual readers (those that are the most likely to read a book through a mail subscription) and hardcore readers (those that are the most likely to buy an e-paper device).
Obviously, companies such as Sony, iRex and Bookeen should focus their marketing effort on this population that already use e-books one way or another (all those people downloading A4 PDF files for example, most downloads on Feedbooks and Manybooks are A4 PDFs).
Keep us posted, Hadrien. I myself like the idea of people being able to get e-books on THEIR terms. And you’re right on about your community-related observation. Thanks. David
And don’t forget http://www.everydayfiction.com/ which offers daily flash fiction to your inbox for free.