Is that a headline of the future? The rumor mill has cranked out enough “what ifs” to come full circle. Ever since Steve jobs announced that no one reads anymore and that publishing is a dead-end market, people have have been picking at him.
But the NY Times’ blog has a post today, not double guessing, but quadruple guessing Jobs and Apple’s plans and wonder if they plan to reinvent book reading the way they reinvented the way people listen to music.
I just saw the theorist has already weighed in on DailyLit, as she has been a subscriber since 2006.
DaliyLit.com is now serving up dollop size doses of books. The new service sends you the book you are reading in installments, either via email or rss, so that you don’t have to ‘burden’ yourself with finding a place to sit and actually hold a book.
I guess there is a market for this? I can’t imagine reading The Terror (which I am about to finish) in my RSS reader alongside random posts from the blogs I lurk. I wondered how long it would take to read a book, the faq’s say:
…am currently reading Dracula, which has 187 installments and I am receiving installments on weekdays, i.e. 5 days/week. So at most it will take me 187/5 = 37 weeks. But when I am on the train or waiting, I often read more than one installment, so I usually wind up reading about 10 installments/week. This means I will finish Dracula in about 19 weeks or 5 months.
I guess that “send me the next installment immediately” feature helps some. The cool part are all the free titles. You don’t have to pay for the Public Domain stuff. So most of the classics are there. I couldn’t find any book that cost more than $6.95. So I guess there’s that factor too.
Let me know if any of you have experience with a service like this. It just seems like it’d be too hard to digest the books in any meaningful way.
{via Guardian Unlimited}
Tomorrow kicks off the 12th year of Small Press Month, highlighting and featuring the smaller fish in the huge ocean of publishing. So let’s hear it for the folks still doing it for the love of it and loving what they sell. Don’t get me wrong, it is still about money and making a living, but there’s something almost perfect about a job that is built around creating and pushing products, you believe in and that you know contribute something to society. It’s about quality… not just appealing to the lowest common denominator.
In So Many Books (which should be required reading for anyone thinking about publishing, Gabriel Zaid notes:
“If not a single book were published from this moment on, it would still take 250,000 years for us to acquaint ourselves with those books already written.”
“Maybe the measure of our reading should therefore be, not the number of books we’ve read, but the state in which they leave us. . . whether the street and the clouds and the existence of others mean anything to us; whether reading makes us, physically, more alive”
Take that you multi-national conglomerates! You get the other 11 months… this one belongs to readers and smaller publishers alike.
