Archive for the ‘Features’ Category

H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds – First Book on Your Phone?

Today is H.G. Wells’ birthday. Here’s why I’m celebrating him today: his War of the Worlds was the very first book loaded onto DailyLit. That’s because my husband, Albert Wenger, always wanted to read War of the Worlds, and DailyLit’s email installments (read on his mobile phone) gave him that chance. In fact, since I believe DailyLit was the first to put books on mobile devices (that was before any apps or Kindles or iPads) War of the Worlds may have been the very first book that could be read on your phone.

So cheers, to H.G. Wells!

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DailyLit is the leading publisher of serialized books in digital form. Selected to be the #1 Book Website by the Sunday Times, DailyLit has sent over 40 million book installments. DailyLit’s books and series are all free and feature bestselling and award-winning titles. Installments can be read in fewer than 5 minutes and can be read wherever you receive email, including on any computer, Blackberry, or iPhone.

DailyLit’s Featured Feature: Vacation Pauses

As you’re planning trips and packing your bags, I wanted to remind you that you can temporarily suspend your books while on vacation. No more installments piling up while you’re away — and you know your book will be back on schedule when you return.

Here’s how it works:
Every installment email you receive contains a link at the bottom that lets you suspend delivery of the book you’re reading. Just click on the link. You’ll see that you can set the installments to automatically resume for whenever you get back (in a few days, a week, or even a month’s time).

So while you’re suspending your newspapers, remember to pause your books as well. Make it a guilt-free vacation!

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DailyLit is the leading publisher of serialized books in digital form. Selected to be the #1 Book Website by the Sunday Times, DailyLit has sent over 40 million book installments. DailyLit’s books and series are all free and feature bestselling and award-winning titles. Installments can be read in fewer than 5 minutes and can be read wherever you receive email, including on any computer, Blackberry, or iPhone.

DailyLit Saves Your Butt on Christmas!

Imagine exchanging presents on Christmas Eve or Christmas morning, and you’ve completely forgotten about your brother’s girlfriend — or your aunt-twice-removed who brought her second cousin.  Shops are closed.   What can you do?  Panic?  Not particularly productive.  DailyLit can help.  All you need to do is excuse yourself to the next room and gift a DailyLit book that will arrive in her inbox thirty second later with a personalized message from you.  Phew!  Here are some suggestions:

Tom Peters’ The Little Big Things: 163 Ways to Pursue Excellence (you can send daily tips to your lazy boyfriend or son-in-law)
Poems by Emily Dickinson (imagine wooing your loved one with daily poems throughout the year)
Berlitz Essential French Phrases (s’il vous plait!)
The Bible (need I say more!)
Brad Meltzer’s Heroes for My Son (a little inbox inspiration)
Cory Doctorow’s Little Brother (for the sci-fi lover)
A Collection of Beatrix Potter Stories or other children’s books (which niece wouldn’t want to find a daily email for her in her mommy’s inbox with a note from you)

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DailyLit is the leading publisher of serialized books in digital form. Selected to be the #1 Book Website by the Sunday Times, DailyLit has sent over 35 million book installments. DailyLit’s books and series are all free and feature bestselling and award-winning titles. Installments can be read in fewer than 5 minutes and can be read wherever you receive email, including on any computer, Blackberry, or iPhone.

DailyLit’s Vacation Pauses

For those of you heading out for the holidays and don’t want your installments to pile up, I wanted to remind you about DailyLit’s “suspend and resume” feature so that you can pause your installments and then automatically have them resume when you return from vacation. You can pause your installments by clicking on the link at the bottom of any book installment — or on your profile page on DailyLit.com.

Happy holidays!

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DailyLit is the leading publisher of serialized books in digital form. Selected to be the #1 Book Website by the Sunday Times, DailyLit has sent over 35 million book installments. DailyLit’s books and series are all free and feature bestselling and award-winning titles. Installments can be read in fewer than 5 minutes and can be read wherever you receive email, including on any computer, Blackberry, or iPhone.

Featured Feature Friday: “Need a break?”

Our DailyLit featured feature of the week is our “Need a break?” feature, perfect for those of you who are planning a get-away or just need a break.

Did you know you can suspend your book installments and have them automatically resume on your return? That way, your installments won’t pile up while you’re away, and you won’t have to worry about remembering to re-start your book when you return.

Here’s how it works:

Each book installment you receive via email contains a link at the bottom that lets you suspend delivery of your book. Just click on it. You can then choose to have your book auto-resume after however many days you select. So if you’re back from the beach in a week’s time, you can have your book automatically resume after 7 days.

Not sure when you’ll be back? Not a problem. You can still suspend your book without auto-resuming. Then, to start reading again, click on the “manage all your settings” link from any previous email. You’ll be brought to a web page where you can resume your book. If you deleted all your past emails, you can just re-subscribe with the same email address for the same book. You’ll receive an email that includes the “manage” link, and you can go from there.

So go ahead, take a break. You deserve it.

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DailyLit is the leading publisher of serialized books in digital form. Selected to be the #1 Book Website by the Sunday Times, DailyLit has sent over 35 million book installments. DailyLit’s books are all free and feature bestselling and award-winning titles. Installments can be read in fewer than 2 minutes and can be read wherever you receive email, including on any computer, Blackberry, or iPhone.

Question of the Week #69: Books on Tumblr

We recently launched DailyLit books on Tumblr, a cool blogging platform. You can read (and share) Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, The Art of War, or Emily Dickinson’s Poems on Tumblr.

Our question for you is this: what should we call these books on Tumblr? Normal Tumblr blogs are called Tumblogs. So, should we go with Tumblooks? Tumblebooks? Tumbooks? Or something different?

Share your suggestions in our Question of the Week forum.

New on DailyLit: Tell-a-Friend Anytime

One of the great things about reading on DailyLit is that it allows you to read with friends and family even if they’re thousands of miles away (check out our recent reader spotlight for one example). We’ve already enabled the ability to tell a friend when you first start reading a book, but now we’ve expanded it to allow you to do the same by clicking on a link in any installment. You can share with friends either by entering their email addresses or pulling your contacts from your email service or Facebook account. Enjoy!

New Invite a Friend Feature on DailyLit

As we first announced in our newsletter yesterday, we’re excited to now be offering a feature on DailyLit that makes it easy to share what you’re reading with friends. When you start reading a book on DailyLit you’ll have the opportunity to invite friends by email (and don’t worry if you can’t remember your friends’ email–we’ve made it so you can easily look them up in your address book). You can also share on Facebook, Yahoo, and other services with just one click. And don’t forget you can link your profile to Twitter to share your news there.

So don’t go it alone–read with friends.

More of Your Questions Answered

–When I click on “Home” it doesn’t take me to the front page-maybe that could use some clearing up?
The “Home” tab on the landing page–signified by a small house icon–does take you to the landing page. The “Settings” tab takes you to a page that allows you to manage your profile and the books you’re reading, create Booklists, and more account management features. Hope that helps clear things up.

–I would appreciate having a selection of books that were available for immediate download, as opposed to a “daily dose.”
The goal of DailyLit has been to provide a unique reading experience–just a small bite a day.  That said, you can read full books in your browser using the “preview” function of DailyLit (just click the “Preview” button on any book’s page). If you’re also interested in downloading full books there are numerous websites that allow you to download entire classics at once and many ebook retailers that provide the same for more contemporary books.

–Been getting a lot of garbled type in your emails and copy…impossible to read.
Hm, not sure what the problem could be here. If you ever have problems with your DailyLit emails please contact us at support[at]dailylit[dot]com so we can work out the issue.

–Keep up the good work. Can we suggest books?
Thanks! And yes, you can suggest books in our Book Request Forum.

–Please provide DailyLit access to the rest of the volumes of Remembrance of things Past.
Unfortuantely Swann’s Way is the only part of Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past that has an English translation freely available. (Volumes I-IV are available online in the original French.) If you have an interest in reading the full work (in either English or French) you might try your local library.

Your Questions Answered

Here’s the first of a series of blog posts answering questions you left for us on our recent reader survey. If you think of other questions you’d like to see answered please send them to us at support[at]dailylit[dot]com!

I would enjoy longer selections…the pieces of the story that come are so short…could you opt to have longer ones?
You can opt to receive installments that are two times or four times as long as the “normal” installments, which are 1000 words each. Just click on “Manage the books you’re reading” link at the bottom of any installment, click on “More” next to the book title, and then set “Installment length” to your desired length. And of course, you can always use the “send next installment immediately” link that appears at the bottom of each installment.

Thanks for the wide variety of book topics! I was curious if you ever do anything strictly visual [eg an art or architecture book]?
We’re getting more into images these days. Check out our Wikipedia Tour: Masterpieces of Western Art and our Shoes, Bags, and Tiaras series from the Victoria & Albert Museum.

I keep getting missed installments! What’s up with that?
I love this concept but for some reason, the two times I’ve tried to read a book via DailyLit, I don’t get all of the installments. It’s rather sporadic. But, I’ll keep trying because it’s such a cool idea.
Emails sometimes don’t appear because they’re blocked by your ISP (Internet Service Provider), company spam filter, or they’re trapped in your own spam folder. First thing to try is to check your spam folder. If they’re not there, they may be trapped at a higher level: there are a lot of aggressive spam filters out there that block messages even before they get to you (hence they don’t even show up in your spam or junk folder). First try resending installments to yourself as described in our FAQs. If you do receive some installments and not others and cannot even resend the missing installments, then you either have to have your system administrator whitelist books [at] dailylit [dot] com or you need to use a different email account. If you are only missing installments occasionally, then you might choose to view installments online.

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