DailyLit: Reading books by email

HT: Boing Boing

DailyLit is a cool concept to deliver books in manageable chunks to your email inbox. In situations like the developing world where access is a big obstacle for readers, a delivery system could make a big impact. Of course you can argue that reading a book in your email program is hardly to be compared to the experience of curling up with a good book. But the truth is that reading behavior is evolving rapidly in the West and more people are reading electronically than ever before and perhaps soon electronic media will outstrip print media. In the developing world, numbers of print readers are already so low, and the saturation of cell phones into African culture, for example, has been so rapid that it is reasonable to expect that electronic media will outstrip print soon if it hasn’t already.

There are three major ways you could do subscriptions using cell phones:

1. A daily MMS subscription that delivers text.
2. A Java applet like Wattpad that streamlines browsing and reading e-books.
3. An RSS reader for cell phones that allows users to choose from content areas of interest.