Posts Tagged ‘Service’

Read DailyLit on your Kindle

We’ve had a number of folks ask about reading DailyLit on their Kindle, so we tested it out and came up with two methods you can use.

Method #1

1) On your computer (because the Kindle browser is more difficult to use), find the book you’d like to read, and view the first “preview” page.
2) Note the URL.
3) Type the URL into your Kindle’s web browser. (On the first-gen Kindle, you will find the browser in the menu under “experimental.”)
4) Once you’re at the page, bookmark it, possibly want to increase the text size, and then start reading.
5) The first DailyLit installment will take up several Kindle “screens,” so use the “next page” Kindle button until you get the the end of the installment.
6) When you get to the end of the installment, use the DailyLit “next” link to view the next installment (or edit the URL to the number of the next installment, if you’re comfortable doing so).
7) When you’re done reading, change your bookmark to the URL of the installment where you left off.

Keep in mind:
- This is not like the “Kindle experience” where you are downloading the whole book first, so you’ll have to stop reading if you lose the internet connection.

Method #2: Using Google Reader

1) On your computer, set up an RSS subscription to the book you’d like to read.
2) On your computer, set up / sign into your RSS feed reader and paste your RSS URL into Google Reader
3) Using Kindle browser, go to: www.google.com/reader/m/
4) Sign in with your Google account.
5) You should see your RSS installments.  Bookmark this page.  Click the installment you want to read.
6) Increase text size, read!
7) Use “next:” button to adavnce through book.

Keep in mind:
-You could do something similar with any online RSS reader of choice, especially if it comes in a “mobile device” format.
- There are numerous resources online with tips on how to use RSS readers on Kindles. You might trying searching for “RSS on Kindle” to find some information.

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.

Reading DailyLit in Google Reader

We recently discovered a bug that affected folks reading DailyLit by RSS using Google Reader. The problem prevented new books from auto-starting when they should–for instance, if you have a To-Read list and finish your current book, the next book on your list should automatically start, and for Google Reader users this wasn’t happening.

We’ve now fixed the bug. If you’re in the middle of reading a book in Google Reader you won’t be affected. If you’ve finished books in Google Reader, it’s possible you might receive an installment from those books, which is unfortunately an unavoidable consequence of our fixing this bug.

If you previously finished a book and expected another book to auto-start and didn’t see it, you can correct the problem by unsubscribing and resubscribing to the feed in Google Reader. Then the feed will update properly and bring you up to speed.