DailyLit

DailyLit: Read books by email and RSS.

This is a site that I ran across some time ago, when it was much younger. The idea is to promote reading. But while people may spend hours a day on e-mail, they may never pick up a book. This site brings the book to e-mail (or RSS reader). Books are delivered in installments that are short enough to be read in about 5 minutes.

You first browse the site to find the book you want to read. They have 700+ free books, mostly older public domain titles. Since I first checked out the site, they have added current copyrighted books that can be read for a small charge ($4-7 for most of the books I saw). For the books where there is a charge, you can read a limited number of installments for free before deciding whether you want to pay to continue reading the book. As you search, you can see how many installments the book is broken into to get an idea of the length of the book.

When you've picked a book, you set it up to be delivered to your e-mail (or RSS) and you determine how often (every day, weekdays, M-W-F) and what time of day you want to receive the installment. In every e-mail you receive, there are links to immediately receive the next installment of the book (for when you have time to read more than 5 minutes), suspend receiving installments, and managing how often and when you receive the installments.

Take a look and maybe you'll find a book to read by e-mail!