Or perhaps you’d prefer not to invest in a pricey e-reader, and would rather use your mobile phone? If you sign up to the Swedish service Storytel, you can download audiobooks split into chunks of about 50 and 150 minutes long – you can even download comic books to browse on-screen.
Now Daily Lit will send you a snippet of your chosen book by email or RSS at the date/time of your choosing – with each instalment small enough to be read in 5 minutes or less.
The makers of Daily Lit admit that they got the idea from newspaper serialisations of classic novels: books they had always meant to read but never got round to – but finally read because each chapter became part of their daily routine of reading the newspaper. They observed that the only thing they did more . The only thing they did more consistently than read the paper was to read their email – and lo, Daily Lit was born,
Ironically it seems we’ve come full circle – whilst we might be accustomed to reading entire volumes of Dickens novels, most of his work was originally published in episodic format, in monthly or weekly instalments in journals – resulting in that famous anecdote of American fans waiting at the docks in New York for the arrival of the latest installment of The Old Curiousity Shop, shouting clamours of ‘Is little Nell dead?’. Whilst the accessibility of literature has meant such anticipation is a rare occasion (with the exception of Harry Potter and the like), it’s fascinating to see that whilst the medium may have changed, how we consume literature seems to have come right back round again…
The ever thoughtful Neil very kindly tagged me as a thinking blogger (thanks Neil!)
Participation rules are simple:
1. If, and only if, you get tagged, write a post with links to 5 blogs that make you think
2. Link to this post so that people can easily find the exact origin of the meme
3. Optional: Proudly display the ‘Thinking Blogger Award’ with a link to the post that you wrote (here is an alternative silver version if gold doesn’t fit your blog)
And here for your reading pleasure are 5 blogs that always get me thinking:
Chris at Mediation – not just a former colleague and all-round-good-egg, but a blogger who always provides lots of tasty morsels of food for thought on the wonderful world of comms planning.
Alex at A Better Course – has both an endless supply of utterly cracking del.icio.us links and fascinating insights into what how and why marketing works.
The man himself has allegedly signed a A$10,000 deal with Zoo magazine, and is said to be launching his career as a party planner.
When Andy Warhol said that everyone gets their 15 minutes of fame, I doubt he could have forecast how quickly microcelebrity would be generated by the power of the internet.
Or, no doubt, how quickly their 15 minutes (seconds?) would be over…
Imagine a spirograph crossed with a candy floss machine crossed with a printer. Or put it another way – remember the replicator from Star Trek which would beam up a fabulously tasty concoction out of this air?
Wouldn’t it be cool if that were real?
Well, the fabulously named Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories have done just that with their latest production CandyFab (aka The Evil Mad Scientist 3D Fabricator)
3D printers aren’t totally new. But they are extremely pricey. The Z Corp Z450 will set you back a cool $40,000. But Candyfab was first built using three sacks of granulated sugar, an aquarium pump, a car jack and some recycled printer parts. And it only bloody works.
It’s totally open source – so you can make one at home. In fact, since people have been making their own at home, printing has been refined from 5 ppi to 20 ppi. Not bad for something home-grown and made using odds and ends on the cheap.
You can now not only see the video, but you can 
