DISQUS

A VC: Reading Books On Twitter

  • S.t · 1 year ago
    Holy Jeez this is a great idea
  • ErikSchwartz · 1 year ago
    I read the headline and I though I would be reading books 140 characters at a time.
  • DorianBenkoil · 1 year ago
    Yeah, mee too. I'm disappointed.
  • Tony Confrey · 1 year ago
    Penguin has also been experimenting with delivering books online as bite-sized chunks. They had a recent experiment that used Twitter, LiveJournal and Google Maps, see http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/penguins_b...

    Theres definitely a hunger among book publishers to figure out ways to leverage new media to deliver their content. I think as we all get reasonably sized screens on our handhelds online reading will get more popular. DailyLit is an interesting angle on it. The notion that I'm reading the book at the same time as others, in the same chunks, opens up a lot of possibilities to leverage social media to enhance the reading experience.

    -Tony
  • jasonkolb · 1 year ago
    Do you find that you actually read this every single day? Or do you let them pile up for a few days and then spend a day catching up? That seems to be my standard mode of operation with blog posts, anyway...
  • gregory · 1 year ago
    the conversation around the reading, possibly better than the book? i would not be surprised .... a shared solitary activity, the essence of the social web, now that i think of it .... :)
  • GeorgeT6 · 1 year ago
    I have not quite made the plunge into Twitter but this seems just the thing to draw me in. Working, as I do, for a tech manufacutrer I could see applying this to a tech goup in reading white papers,etc.
  • Holly Hoffman · 1 year ago
    Sweet! I'll be reading Pride & Prejudice (for the millionth time, thank you). This is awesome, and great for those of us who can't actually find a worthwhile book club.
  • adityagada · 1 year ago
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  • neekolas · 1 year ago
    This is something that has been going on in Japan for a few years now (South Korea too). Techcrunch wrote about it in December http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/12/02/in-japan-h.... Seems like most things in the mobile sector hit Japan 2-3 years before they become popular stateside (see: 3G, cameraphones, SMS). Dailylit's timing might just be right.
  • neekolas · 1 year ago
    The important distinction between what is going on in Japan and what Dailylit is doing is that the Japanese books are being written on mobile devices for mobile devices. I think it takes a particular style of writing to work on a mobile device. Self help might work as-is because it is designed to be bite-sized, but Pride and Prejudice probably won't.
  • susandanziger · 1 year ago
    Actually, thousands of people have already read Pride and Prejudice in short installments via DailyLit. Since each installment is about a thousand words (under 5 minutes of reading), a book that may seem daunting to read suddenly becomes quite manageable. In fact, this is very much in the tradition of serialization when Dickens' books were initially released in installments in weekly newspapers (and each weekly installment was approximately 5000 words).
  • neekolas · 1 year ago
    Interesting, I had no idea about that little piece of history. I still maintain that this format will serve certain genres far better than others. In Japan, the most popular forms of keitai shousetsu are pulp fiction/romance, which seems like an appropriate type of content for the medium. A novel by Michael Ondaatje, however, would not be well served being broken into discrete chunks. It has flow and style and complexity that would be lost reading it over a period of weeks. I'm not sure if pulp fiction will be the dominant form of American mobile reading, there are massive cultural differences, but I doubt that success in hardcover will ever function as a valid proxy for success on the mobile.

    Does anyone know if Dailylit is planning on adding a mobile uploading capability? I guess anyone could put something like that together with twitter-rss capability and a blog, though.
  • susandanziger · 1 year ago
    Not sure what you mean by "mobile uploading capability". Please explain.
    Thanks.
  • neekolas · 1 year ago
    I mean books from mobile to mobile
  • neekolas · 1 year ago
    I mean books written from mobile ---> read on mobile
  • susandanziger · 1 year ago
    We would certainly consider it, although for now we are focusing on bestselling titles; books by well-known authors; and works that have been critically well-reviewed.
  • susandanziger · 1 year ago
    ...do you think books written on mobile devices would be of interest to readers here?
  • fredwilson · 1 year ago
    The sign of a good web company: when the ceo replies to comments in blog posts about her product. Well done
  • smilbandit · 1 year ago
    I looked into dailylit but it didn't really click for me. My daughter (8) loves getting email. I send her emails and get other family members to send them also because none of her friends are using the internet for more then webkinz. It would be an interesting to see if she would like to get a book via email everyday, for some light summer reading. A childrens book and a wikipedia tour might be perfect.
  • simondodson · 1 year ago
    dam . count me in..
  • Dhrumil · 1 year ago
    I just installed it. Thinking about how I will use it.
  • auston · 1 year ago
    Fred, you're the greatest man!
  • Adrian · 1 year ago
    Good stuff, great idea!
  • Jasonp107 · 1 year ago
    You know, it seems to me like one of those twitterbots (like @winetweets) would be a great way to aggregate the conversation around any particular book.

    I don't have the technical know-how to set one up, but doing something like @dailylitconvo whenever you wanted to discuss a theme, issue, idea, or anything related to the current books could be cool. Or maybe a bot for each book.