I’ve recently stumbled upon a new Internet service called DailyLit http://dailylit.com . Millions of people worldwide who use Computers, PDAs and Smart Phones spend way too much time on email and not enough time reading books.
DailyLit brings literature to email and to mobile devices. It allows you to subscribe to books online and have these sent in chunks to your email inbox on a daily basis for a daily dose of lit reading. Perfect for folks who use public transportation to commute and have a smart phone. This is an interesting alternative to e-book readers as it allows people to use their current mobile email devices as digital books and not carry yet another gizmo. DailyLit idea is one of those ideas that sound trivial after you hear them because it makes so much sense, but it is brilliant nevertheless in its simplicity and usefulness.
Many of the books on DailyLit come from open-content Internet book archives such as the Gutenberg that was with us from the first days of the Internet. Thousands of free classics in the public domain are available on the Internet in ascii format. The problem with these books is that it is all too easy to lose where you have stopped reading and therefore a pain to resume reading.
When I’m reading an asccii book, I enter a special text string where I stopped reading using a word processor, save the string with the text, and search for it again to find where I stopped when I want to start reading again… Needless to say that is a quite dumb and error prone method to read digital books and many people will not even bother with these kinds of hassles. DailyLit overcomes this problem by managing the book parts for readers and by pushing them to readers’ computers and phones sequentially.
I presume that DailyLit will start offering subscription plans for non-free books in the near future.
DailyList.com is also very cleverly designed. I wish more sites that I use will use its design principles: very light use of graphics, very fast to load, friendly short permanent URLs everywhere, a very clear value preposition and messaging, a nicely done books directory and search, there’s a blog and forums and very few barriers to start using the service – you can subscribe to books without creating an account with the service but you will want to create an account to participate in the forums and manage your subscriptions once you are an active user…
I didn’t have a chance to play around with DailyLit RSS books delivery method yet but I’m sure that I’m going to have fun with it soon…
It will be interesting to see how DailyList evolves in the near future. It claims 100K subscriptions on its blog – an impressive number. Good luck DailyLit – making moeny by getting people to read more books is definitely a noble cause…
It is also nice to see that there’s still innovation around books in this age of Internet video everywhere.
