Books via email
Ey up internet. Being self employed, one must seize opportunities with both sweaty hands when they present themselves. To that end, I have been working like the divil and neglecting my other pursuits.
So here’s a quick one for you, Dailylit.com. They send you books by email. Choose from a large selection of public domain works, give them an email address and they send you a chapter of your chosen literary work each day.
I’m currently working my way through War of the Worlds.
You can choose to receive a chapter daily, every weekday or a couple of times a week. If you find yourself wanting the next installment right away, there is an option at the end of the email to have the next chapter sent to you immediately.
It’s a nice, straightforward, and simple service with none of the usual internet 2.0 hoopla.
October 7th, 2006 at 1:08 am
If you want to just download something and read it, I’d go for Project Gutenberg (http://www.gutenberg.org/). That, funnily enough, is where I read War Of The Worlds, and a bunch of other stuff. They seem to have turned into some sort of mad wiki thing. Which is what you mean by the usual Web 2.0 hoopla, I now realise…
I can see the benefit of having a short snippet delivered every now and then. For instance, my mobile can receive emails, but it doesn’t believe in the Internet beyond Yahoo…so that might be cool.
October 7th, 2006 at 11:36 am
Good old Project Gutenberg. I remember downloading lots of Jules Verne and other great stuff from them way back in 1995. I thought; brilliant I won’t have to buy any of these books for college, I’ll just read them in these massive txt files. Somehow I never made it through them.
Still it is a noble enterprise, but I like the Dailylit idea of sending it in readable chunks to a mobile device or email address.
October 11th, 2006 at 11:12 pm
On the mobile device, it probably serves a similar purpose to having knitting handy, in that it lets you divorce yourself from wherever you’re having to be. And it lets you endure meetings while appearing productive, to boot!
Getting it sent via email if it doesn’t synchronize with a mobile / handheld device, though, would probably not work for you, I’m guessing, as having to sit down to the PC to read just doesn’t get it.
October 17th, 2006 at 7:05 am
All I can say is, don’t pick Three Lives by Gertrude Stein. Trust me on that one. (Yes, DailyLit has it.)