Books By E-mail and RSS: Q&A With the Creator of DailyLit.com

DailyLit.com, a Web site based in New York that currently offers a free service allowing users to read entire books via e-mail and RSS installments, recently announced plans for aggressive growth. DailyLit currently allows visitors to sign up to receive more than 370 classic and contemporary titles, free of charge, in installments designed to be read in less than five minutes.

The contemporary titles used are available via Creative Commons, a non-profit that offers an alternative to full copyright, built within current copyright law, that allows you to share your creations with others and use music, movies, images and text online that’s been marked with a Creative Commons license.

The company has recently introduced copyrighted works licensed from publishers and authors.

Susan Danziger is the publisher and co-founder of DailyLit with her husband, Albert Wenger.

Danziger’s bio includes positions as the head of business affairs for the corporate development group and children’s media divisions at Random House Inc. She says she also joined a team to spearhead Random House’s corporate electronic book program. She founded and continues to run her own media company, Fox Meadow Media, which represents international authors and publishers in the acquisition and licensing of publishing and media rights.

Book Business Extra spoke with Danziger about her insights behind the creation of DailyLit.com, advantages of digital books, the future of digital and more.

EXTRA: What inspired the creation of DailyLit?

DANZIGER: We got the idea for DailyLit after The New York Times serialized several classic books in special supplements a few summers ago. We read books we had always meant to read because each chapter became part of our daily routine of reading the newspaper. The only thing we do more consistently than read the paper is read e-mail. And voila! We put together a first version and began reading the classics via e-mail installments.