Ease into e-reading
August 10th, 2007 | 
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I usually go to Jazzercise for two classes a day. In between classes I try to do a little reading. It’s only fifteen minutes so I find it hard to get back into a novel, so I have decided to give Daily Lit a try. Daily lit sends me bite size portions of a book on a daily basis. I like getting the books via my RSS reader. I find it more convenient than having it emailed to me and it just looks better on my N800. The best thing about it is that I am able to finish reading my installment in plenty of time and it gives me a sense of accomplishment. I really don’t get into classics that much, but by reading for short periods of time I find that I am starting to like older prose. So, could this help people who are reluctant to try e-books? I think it could, by letting them get their feet wet. It could also foster learning the ins and outs of the reading software, such as navigation, dictionary features, etc. between installments. Over time they may lose some of their attachment to paper. I don’t know of any service that would send popular books via email or RSS feeds, but I will look. I wouldn’t want to pay unless I got to keep the book in its entirety at the end. Maybe receiving the first chapter of an e-book for free could work and also boost e-book sales.
Posted in E-books
I really like the idea behind DailyLit although I would never read “War and Peace” using RSS feeds
I could imagine going even further than DailyLit, why not using Twitter, that would send you a few lines twice a day by SMS instead ?
I’ll do some extra thinking about all this in the future. Currently Feedbooks output e-books for dedicated readers, but we could output e-mail, RSS or SMS too. There’s no limit here, but how many people really read e-books this way ?
I’ve seen A LOT of coverage for DailyLit all around the web (Digg, Lifehacker, TechCrunch, Teleread etc…) yet their ranking on Alexa is pretty low (144.000 or so).
Since you are not able to “get into your book” during a 15 minute break, you definitely wouldn’t want to read the way I sometimes do, i.e. during TV commercials. These are usually 2 to 6 minutes and my wife makes fun of me for doing it, but I learned a long time ago to take advantage of odd moments to read. Other examples are stand in line at a fast food place. That’s where my Palm T/X comes in handy. Otherwise I like my Sony Reader.
Don, The problem is that when people see me reading they take it as an open invitation to come talk to me. I guess they think I’m lonely or something. I do read and watch TV together, and you’re right. I get a fair ammount of reading done that way.
Ellen
Hadrien,
Funny you should mention “War and Peace”. My husband is using his iPhone to read exactly that! He thinks it cool. I told him, I couldn’t do it in a milliion years. I am not familiar with Twitter. I keep hearing about it, so I will check it out. Thanks for the Feedbook info. I will go take a look. As far as how many people read in this manner, I have no idea. I’m thinking probably the smartphone crowd would be a target group. Thanks for considering the possibilities.
Ellen
Hadrien,
I went to Feedbooks and realized that it was already one of my bookmarks. Is there a page that explains this site (dummy proof) and how to get a RSS feed into it? I put in a few urls and got an error. I think that this could be a great workaround to getting RSS feeds onto my Sony reader.
Ellen
Not yet, I’ll start working on a full help section & faq for the website next week.
The RSS feature is still in an alpha stage: some RSS feeds work 100% with very nice formatting etc… Some don’t work at all. We’re re-building the way we generate RSS feeds from the ground up, it may take some extra time but it’ll work a lot better.
It’s already working quite well for your blog though: http://www.feedbooks.com/news/rss2pdf/644?format=sony
Hadrien,
OK. I must have done something wrong. I will try this over the next few days with my Sony. Thanks for your help.
Ellen
Ellen, out of curiosity, what app is your husband using to read W&P? I didn’t know an e-book reader had been ported into the iPhone yet.
Steve,
At first he chose RSS feed. The first installment come in and he read it using Safari. But then he couldn’t get subsequent files. So we changed it to email. Now it comes to his iphone via email and when he taps it, it opens up in safari (Macreader) and he can read it. HTH
Ellen