DailyLit
Good news--a huge chunk of Cory Doctorow's oeuvre is now available for free at DailyLit. DailyLit has a brilliant premise: sign up, choose a book or two, and get a shortish segment of the book delivered to you each day (email or RSS). They have tons of free public domain books (and some Creative Commons ones, like Lessig's Free Culture), and more recent books are available for anywhere from $4.95 to $9.95. I'm all about the free, but there are some very useful selections (given the daily way you'll be receiving them) available for pay: language books, SAT review, etc. The poetry section is currently limited to dead, free folks. If you're a poet who makes your books (oop, outside of copyright, owned by you, etc.) available on the web, please consider contacting DailyLit. I'd love to see more poetry selections available.
This said, I have to admit that when I first found DailyLit last fall, I signed up for The Scarlet Pimpernel--available in only 105 parts, which seemed unambitious--but quickly fell behind, felt like I was drowning in backed-up Scarlet Pimpernel emails, and quit.
Brijit
Brijit reads magazines--both print and web-based--so you don't have to--or, better yet, so you can choose which articles you want to track down and read in full. It's also free. Receive 100-words-or-less reviews/abstracts of articles in Slate, Salon, The Onion A.V. Club, Rolling Stone, The New Yorker, The Believer, Conde Nast Traveler, The Economist, and so on, by email or RSS feed. Brijit pays writers 5 bucks per article to write the summaries/reviews. Some publications aren't reviewed as frequently or thoroughly as others (I haven't received too many from The Believer). I subscribe to about fifteen and read them in my feed reader. I love this tool, because I rarely read magazines even in waiting rooms (always have a book along), and it helps me get a feel for what's going on in magazine-reader-land. Brijit also offers summaries of a number of TV shows, including The Colbert Report, The Daily Show, and Meet the Press.
Zamzar
Zamzar offers free online file conversion. Convert an ancient WordPerfect doc to a Word doc, a doc to a pdf or docx, a jpg to a gif, etc. Super simple, done in an instant, and very useful to me at the library when someone brings in a document in a format our computers don't recognize. Can also convert music and video files in one format to another.
3 comments:
Thanks for the notice, Emily. Glad to know you like what we're doing at Brijit.
On "The Believer" (I'm a fan, too), they're generally a monthly, but sometimes they double-up at odd times (like the current March/April), which can make our coverage seem inconsistent.
Also, I know you wrote that you get your Brijit fix via RSS, but if you're so inclined, we've got a pretty great blog widget that enables you to share pretty much whatever you want, however you want, from all your favorite sources. If you sign up and head over to your profile page, I think you might find it a really valuable addition to poesy galore.
Great name for a blog, by the way.
Best,
Jeremy Brosowsky
founder, Brijit
Hey Emily...
Thanks for mentioning Brijit (like I need something else to suck my time). It looks like a great tool and I plan to sign up. However, your link leads to some weird genealogy site (URL for that site is brijit.com and Brijit is www.brijit.com.
I love your blog and your strip.
Yikes! Thanks for the compliments and the heads-up, k: it's fixed now.
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