Since 2006, email service DailyLit has offered to deliver five-minute chunks of fiction to your inbox every day classics for free, new titles purchased for a little more.
It is trying a new approach in partnership with Rooster, a company set up by a novelist, the founder of StumbleUpon, and a former New York Times reporter a potential holy trinity of literature, distribution, and short attention spans.
Rooster is a subscription-based iPhone app which promises to select “great fiction that fits your day”, as if reading were just another drudge activity like doing the laundry to be packed in around the real business of work.
For a subscription of 3 a month, you will receive a carefully selected work of contemporary fiction, and/or one classic per month a discount on the list price, at least which can be read in a nicely designed app.
It’s an ebook with push notifications, essentially, and it’s hard for this not to grate a little. According to such time-based logic, you might end up hiring a TaskRabbit to read it for you.
Dickens is usually cited here, but his serial fiction was a product of the technology of the time. The rhythm of magazine publication shaped the stories he told a long way from a book arbitrarily divided into timed chunks.
If you like the sort of semi-quirky fiction and classic novels that seem to get prioritised by “personal” recommendation services such as Rooster (and by personal, I mean picked by an American editor rather than an algorithm), then it might have something for you.
If you need to be reminded to read a book every day, I suggest the problems in your reading life are too great for any app to be of help to you.
The Guardian
