also kindles interest

Via Ron Hogan at GalleyCat, I just heard about DailyLit.

What an amazingly great idea! You want to read a public domain classic (and a growing list of copyrighted works)? Sign up and get an e-mail a day (or an RSS feed) and read your book in byte-size installments.

Read all about the various ways to make this simple, free service work for you. (You don’t have to wait till the next day to read the next installment if you just can’t wait.) I’m signing up right now to get The Education of Henry Adams, starting tomorrow, in 197 parts!

Really, I think this is genius—not so much because it will be self-sustaining (I can’t see reading this way for many consecutive books … though, who knows? I haven’t even tried it yet—and, like every other lit snot, I was certainly wrong about audiobooks: I thought the idea was ridiculous, and it’s a huge part of the book business) but rather because it will certainly reignite people’s passion for reading in long form—as in, you know, real books.

At the same time, it enables those who love to read but really can’t spare the time (say, a presidential candidate or a neurosurgeon at a teaching hospital or a traffic controller or a law clerk or nurse on 12-hour shifts) to get their fix and reconnect with their passion.

Kudos.

It’s in this spirit that I embrace digitization. Again:

if you want to save books, set them free

As Spengler said in quite a different context the other day: when nothing works, you try everything.