Mobdex: Read novels via RSS, a page a day

January 4, 2005

Russell Beattie has a novel (ahem) approach to reading classic public domain texts. Its through the use of his site Mobdex.com, a database of Project Guttenberg texts, that he has set up to be distributed via RSS:

I just had an idea for a system where you could choose any one of the public domain eBooks out there and have a small chunk delivered daily via RSS. Many of us are too busy to read classic books out there, instead choosing “page turners” or books that are more applicable to our every day lives (like a some new marketing book).

But we do have time to zip through our aggregator daily, right? So by taking a 500 page novel and distributing it, a few pages at a time, via RSS, we could read a new book in a month or so without even trying.

With that theory in mind, I added a new feature to Mobdex. You can now subscribe serially to any of the ebooks there. Simply find a book, note it’s ID number, then subscribe to the RSS feed like this:

http://www.mobdex.com/rss?book=116&id=russ

Brilliant, right? Think of the possibilities with automated delivery to PDAs, cell phones, etc. Kudos to Russ!