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By David Rothman

Daily LitBook 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.”

 
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