This postAs noted over at Lifehack.org, there’s a cool web app called DailyLit which breaks eBooks up into bite-sized chunks (each readable in five minutes or so) and sends them to you via e-mail however often you’d like.
It’s pretty easy and needs no explanation really. All you do is choose the text (they have 243 books up right now, all presumably out of copyright — my guess is that they’re getting them from Project Gutenberg), say how often you want to get e-mails (MWF, weekdays, or daily) and at what time of day, and put in your e-mail address. And that’s it. (Well, you need to reply to the validation e-mail as well.)
Here’s how big the first part of The Legend of Sleepy Hollow was, in Gmail:
They say they’ll have HTML e-mails coming soon, which’ll be nice because the typography leaves something to be desired. (The odd linebreaks come from paragraphs that are longer than 1,000 characters — they explain it on their FAQ.) Regardless, there’s virtually no barrier to entry — no signup forms getting in the way — and that’s a very good thing.
Really, this is a splendid idea, because we read e-mail all the time, and it’s not hard to make time for a few minutes a day of this. For more modern-minded readers the book selection may not be interesting, but for anyone who likes old books (and I’m very much one of those sorts), the choices are superb.
I wonder how long it’d take to put together an RSS-generating app like this, so I could read books in Google Reader instead. (My inbox tends to get clogged — as many of you have noticed :) — and so it’d be nice to have the books off in Google Reader instead, where I can read them when I read other blogs. Admittedly I’d lose some of the advantage of having the book pushed to me every day, since some days I don’t check up on Google Reader, but it’s a thought.)
