Reading the Classics via Email

You might have a large collection of thick classics sitting on your bookshelf at home right now. You bought them years ago but have yet to touch them. A fine layer of dust seems to have permanently attached itself to the cover. You were waiting for that rainy Saturday where you could curl up on the sofa with Wuthering Heights or The Art of War, or perhaps Alexander Hamilton's The Federalist Papers.

But come that rainy day and you don't feel hardy enough to take on that ominous layer of dust. Your allergies are pretty dreadful and you're pretty sure that it would take you three years of rainy Saturdays to get through Crime and Punishment. You have to go to work and you have things to do, and frankly, it's pretty silly to start something you know you can't finish. Plus, Crime and Punishment makes an excellent doorstop so why change what's already just fine?

Luckily, you won't have to stop using Crime and Punishment as a doorstop or forgo your ambition to read it. Dust is a health hazard, but luckily, email is so new that no studies have been released as of yet that report on the ill-effects of reading it. And it's via email that DailyLit brings the classics (all public domain works) in small digestable episodes/parts/messages straight into your inbox, as frequently as you like. Each message is supposed to take less than 5 minutes to read, according to the site, and can be read via your PDA of choice. How long it takes to read the entire novel, of course, varies. Les Miserables is a total of 679 parts (yikes!) and Oscar Wilde's play, The Importance of Being Earnest, is only 28 parts.

Now I'm sure you're all wondering, aren't these books copyrighted? In the site's FAQs, the DailyLit team addresses this aspect with a short and sweet reponse: "For the time being, everything on DailyLit is in the public domain. If you nonetheless believe there is a copyright issue, please refer to our Terms for notification procedure. We hope to get lots of readers and eventually convince publishers that they should make copyrighted books available on DailyLit as well. We will keep you posted."  

In closing, it's National Literacy Month anyway, so go read something.