October 24, 2006
History by Email
By Elisabeth Grant
At work, at school, and at home, we’re always checking our email. Email has become a necessity and an obsession, and for good or bad most of us are checking our inboxes multiple times a day. The creators of DailyLit have created a service that takes advantage of the email obsession and allows users to multi-task even more. At dailylit.com email enthusiasts can sign up for their favorite literary classics and receive them in discrete chunks by email every day. Each book is broken up into parts, and depending on the length of the work this ranges from just a few parts (Common Sense by Thomas Paine comes in 24 parts) to hundreds (History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire – Volume 1 comes in 264 parts). Each day (or how ever often you select) you’ll be sent one part that should take around 5 minutes to read.
At DailyLit you can search for books by genre, author, or title – all books on the site are in the public domain, in the future DailyLit hopes to work with publishers to put up more recent works as well. Currently, there are 11 books listed in the History genre. Here are a few:
- The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin by Benjamin Franklin (75 parts)
- The Federalist Papers by Alexander Hamilton (208 parts)
- The Crisis by Winston Churchill
- Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl Written by Herself by Harriet Ann Jacobs (96 parts)
- Speeches and Letters of Abraham Lincoln by Abraham Lincoln (134 parts)
Will the emails from DailyLit replace the experience of reading a book from cover to cover? Probably not. But they may make your inbox a more interesting place to go.
Comment:
Quite frankly, I don’t see the point of receiving something like the Speeches and Letters of Abraham Lincoln in pre-selected chunks in one’s e-mail. No two people read a work like that, or like the Federalist Papers, in the same way; some individuals will plow straight through, absorbing discrete blocks of information every day, while others (like me) will ignore the work for days and then consume it all in one brain-death-defying frenzy.
The beauty of a book is that one can choose just how and when one is going to devour its contents. DailyLit’s service seems to serve no other purpose than to destroy that individualized process of reading consumption.
— Nonpartisan Oct 24, 11:42 AM