The Montreal Gazette has a story today: “Books by email – a novel idea: DailyLit.com offers titles in snippets. Site offers hundreds of titles in the public domain – whose copyrights have expired”.
What’s the deal?
DailyLit.com lets you browse by author or title. You can view a detail page of your selection that includes the cover image and opening snippet, and DailyLit tells you how many parts the book is divided into (how many email snippets you’ll receive in order to read the whole book).
Clever idea but there are a couple of drawbacks. The books are anywhere from 17 parts to over 400. That’s a lot of emails. It would take you more than a year to read Middlemarch.
The good thing is that the service is free. The Gazette says, “The free service was launched in September and by word of mouth alone it has raked in 15,000 regular subscribers.” Clearly there’s a demand.
The about section of DailyLit describes the site as follows:
Quote: We created DailyLit because we spent hours each day on email but couldnít find the time to read a book. Now the books come to us by email. Problem solved. We will use this blog to write about new features and (hopefully) receive feedback from readers.
There’s no mention of who the “we” is, however, the Gazette quotes a female literary agent “Danziger” several times. No first name.
One of her points that resonated with me is that book publishers may consider doling out copyrighted titles on a paid subscription. Danzinger is “also pushing to have authors offer email snippets of their books as a marketing tool.” Fantastic idea.
Publishers and authors (not all, but many) will be resistant to the idea of giving away the content for free, but I say fear not. Reading a book over the course of a year can’t be that fun. Depending on your email platform, the messages will likely bounce as spam. But what you could get through (spam filters and people’s attention span), could engage readers, could give them a chance to sample new books, and, done right, could generate word of mouth for books.
Someone–Amazon, Indigo, indie collective, Random House’s booklounge.ca, HarperCollins’ First Look program, any publisher–should create a service that allows people to select the genre of books they’re interested in, and each day? week? month? sends them a little excerpt. The key elements would be 1) a company that wants to build stronger relations with their customer base, 2) a “buy the book” option, either direct online sales or with affiliates, that would complete the selling cycle and allow users to access the detail page info, and, most important, 3) an existing customer base of readers who want to discover new books. Opportunity is knocking.
Or DailyLit.com has plans to open up paid subs with publishers. Why not open up a web interface to the DailyLit database and allow publishers to submit snippets of new works. Everything remains free. New books and old books feed each other. Copyright and serialization are not an issue for the new stuff. Brilliant. Is anyone doing this already?