{"id":299,"date":"2007-08-08T05:00:41","date_gmt":"2007-08-08T13:00:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rightreading.com\/blog\/2007\/08\/08\/daily-lit\/"},"modified":"2007-08-08T05:01:39","modified_gmt":"2007-08-08T13:01:39","slug":"daily-lit","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rightreading.com\/blog\/webwork\/daily-lit\/","title":{"rendered":"Daily Lit"},"content":{"rendered":"

If you like your literature bite-sized, Daily Lit<\/a> could be the answer. It will send you a five-minute passage of a selection of public domain books by e-mail or rss every day (or on request). War and Peace,<\/em> for example, comes in 675 parts, so you could finished it up in a couple of years, reading five minutes a day. So if you are long-lived and read your e-mails regularly you could make your way through as many as two or three dozen books of that length in your lifetime. Then again, you could knock off the Daode jing<\/em> in just a couple of weeks.<\/p>\n

The Daode jing<\/em> (Tao Te Ching) is an interesting case. Daily Lit’s web page for that book shows an image of the cover of the Stephen Mitchell edition. If you click on the book it takes you to the book’s Amazon page. But the Mitchell rendering is not public domain. The sample text Daily Lit shows begins like this:<\/p>\n

PART 1.
\nCh. 1. 1. The Tao that can be trodden is not the enduring and unchanging Tao. The name that can be named is not the enduring and unchanging name.
\n2. (Conceived of as) having no name, it is the Originator of heaven and earth; (conceived of as) having a name, it is the Mother of all …<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

That doesn’t sound much like Stephen Mitchell to me. The Mitchell version starts this way:<\/p>\n

The tao that can be told
\nis not the eternal tao
\nThe name that can be named
\nis not the eternal name<\/p>\n

The unnameable is the eternally real
\nNaming is the origin
\nof all particular things.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

For comparison, here the version I published, by Red Pine:<\/p>\n

The way that becomes a way
\nis not the Immortal Way
\nthe name that becomes a name
\nin not the Immortal Name
\nthe maiden of Heaven and Earth has no name
\nthe mother of all things has a name<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Why does Daily Lit link to a copyrighted version of the book from which they are offering public domain snippets? I suppose they monetize their site through the Amazon Associates program, figuring after a few months of e-mailed bits of a book you might be hooked enough to actually buy the book. Why you would do so by clicking through from Daily Lit isn’t clear to me, but I imagine the link is included in the feeds and e-mails. Is that a viable business model?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

If you like your literature bite-sized, Daily Lit could be the answer. It will send you a five-minute passage of a selection of public domain books by e-mail…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0},"categories":[13,3],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rightreading.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/299"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rightreading.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rightreading.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rightreading.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rightreading.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=299"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rightreading.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/299\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rightreading.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=299"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rightreading.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=299"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rightreading.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=299"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}