The serial publishing start-up Plympton, named after a street in Harvard Square, is merging with DailyLit in a partnership that will expand the former’s reach while offering new content to the latter’s audience….

DailyLit, which began as a service in 2006 to e-mail short installments of books for consumers to read on different mobile devices, is being merged with Plympton, a digital publishing house dedicated to serialized fiction founded by journalist Jennifer 8. Lee and the novelist Yael Goldstein Love. Lee plans to use DailyLit’s digital platform to continue to offer serialized titles from other publishing houses, but also to promote Plympton's original series….

Could serialized fiction finally force the e-book to evolve?
Various ventures are trying to satisfy a common complaint about e-books: that they are simply black-and-white digital reproductions of long-form print books, flat and unoriginal in their design and concept. One variation, what publishers call enhanced e-books, with audio and video elements woven throughout the text, has largely fallen flat with readers….

Amazon’s announcement about its updated line of Kindles earlier this month wasn’t just about hardware. The company also announced “Kindle Serials,” stories published in automatically updated installments. Kindle Serials launched with eight titles for purchase. Three of them were published by Plympton, an e-publishing house founded by novelist Yael Goldstein Love and former New York Times reporter Jennifer 8. Lee. Plympton aims to produce serialized versions of its fiction offerings….

Fellow fiction writers,

Let's be frank: we're not the healthiest-minded bunch. If we were we'd spend our days doing something more pleasant than writing fiction. But lately we seem to have taken a turn for the worse. We look out at the shifting landscape of publishing - e-books rising, big publishers quaking - and obsessively ask, both publicly and privately, Is the novel dead? Is it all Fifty Shades of Twilight from here on out? Are we going the way of the poets, soon to be read by only each other?....

It’s hard for people to understand why they need to pay for good online content. Because digital content is freely available on numerous pirating sites or services and there are no physical goods involved, a sense of entitlement seems to have kicked in that says “hell, there’s nothing in my hand! It should be free!” The music industry has battled this problem for years, as has the film industry. But perhaps the industry that has been most effected by this shift to “but why isn’t it free?!” is publishing, which can’t rely on theaters (like Hollywood) or concerts (music). The mindset seems to be that since anybody can start a Tumblr blog for free, there’s no way creating content should cost money….

Literature is thriving on the web. It's not just for sale on mega-sites such as Amazon either, but being swapped, analysed and recommended by fellow bookworms. You can download page after page of free material, post your work online and - dare we say it - even catch the eye of a publisher….

Susan Danziger is founder and CEO of DailyLit LLC, whose site delivers serialized stories via e-mail and RSS feeds. She and her husband, Albert Wenger, thought up the business a few years ago after seeing that The New York Times had serialized Truman Capote's Breakfast at Tiffany's.

Danziger remembers thinking, as she carried her paper daily onto the train for her commute into New York, that the only item she carries around more often than the newspaper was her smartphone. So she and Wenger decided to build an application that would deliver classic novels electronically….

Before this week I’d never really heard much aboutDailyLit, a site that Emails you books in short, easily-consumable chunks. But after a few days of receivingThe Count of Monte Cristo in my Email inbox every morning, I think I may be hooked – these serialized novels couldn’t be more perfect for a 10 minute coffee break or waiting at the bus stop….

If you're like me, you've always meant to get around to reading Tom Jones or The Last of the Mohicans or The Count of Monte Cristo, but, what with mountains of new releases beckoning from the bookstore shelves, re-reading old favorites like Pride and Prejudice or Harry Potter, and wallowing in the delights of modern genre-literature (personally, I'm a sucker for British murder mysteries, of which there are mounds) those great books of the past keep getting relegated to the bottom of the stack….

A study published last November by the National Endowment for the Arts doesn’t dwell on the popularity of e-mail as an explanation for the declining interest in reading books, magazines, and newspapers. It states only that e-mailing, along with watching television, playing video games, instant messaging, and Web surfing, accounts for 20 percent of what individuals aged eighteen to twenty-four consider their reading time. It seems those who claim they don’t have the time to read—or even the interest—still keep up with the daily flow of e-mail messages. But long before the study was released, Susan Danziger and her husband, Albert Wenger, had already figured out the same thing, and in response they founded DailyLit, a new Web site that e-mails serialized installments of classic books to readers each day.

A new Web site is offering to send classic books in bite-size installments to your handheld device or e-mail every morning before you go to work, or whenever you want, for free.

The e-mails from www.dailylit.com are designed to be read in under five minutes. Jules Verne's "Around the World in 80 Days" comes in 82 parts while Leo Tolstoy's "Anna Karenina" could take nearly two years of working days to read at 430 parts….