LIFE OF JOHNSON THE E-Z WAY:

Caution: E-mail installments of 'Moby-Dick' may prove habit-forming (CECELIA GOODNOW, 5/31/07, Seattle Post Intelligencer)

Call me Ishmael.

Whew -- that's enough literature for one day.

Fortunately, I can resume this fish tale when DailyLit sends my next "Moby-Dick" installment in tomorrow's e-mail. It's due to arrive at 8:30 a.m.

DailyLit, a free service created by a husband-wife team with roots in publishing and online networking, is like a One-A-Day vitamin for the literarily malnourished.

Choose from among the 370 public-domain works at dailylit.com, specify when and how you want to receive installments -- e-mail or RSS feeds -- and you're good to go.

Each day's fare is sized to be read in five minutes or less. That's about a screenful of single-spaced text -- not quite as pithy as "Call me Ishmael," but less daunting than staring down Herman Melville's 700-page masterpiece in its entirety.

DailyLit creators Susan Danziger and Albert Wenger said the service is designed largely for harried techies who can't break away from the tube long enough to read the books they studiously avoided in high school.

Except that they just read Atlas Shrugged and Star Trek books (in Klingon).

Posted by Orrin Judd at May 31, 2007 7:30 AM