I was intrigued the other day by the announcement that Grove/Atlantic was releasing Mike Lawson’s new book digitally, through DailyLit.com, two months ahead of its bookstore appearance.

First of all, I went to check out DailyLit. Here’s what they say about themselves:

We got the idea for DailyLit after the New York Times serialized a few classic works in special supplements a few summers ago. We wound up reading books that we had always meant to simply by virtue of making them part of our daily routine of reading the newspaper. The only thing we do more consistently than read the paper is read email. Bingo!

DailyLit sends books in installments via e-mail or RSS feed. We currently offer over 750 classic and contemporary books available entirely for free or on a Pay-Per-Read basis (with sample installments available for free). You can read your installments wherever you receive e-mail/RSS feeds, including on your Blackberry and iPhone.

DailyLit allows you to schedule the time of arrival of your installments (you can also click on a link to download more immediately), and each installment takes under five minutes to read.

Under five minutes to read.

I’ll come back to this in a minute, but first I want to say that although I’ve read less than ten minutes of Mike Lawson, it’s pretty clear that he’s an airport read. I’ve got absolutely nothing against airport reads—in fact, the $9.95 price tag, the absence of the extra weight in my carry-on, and the sparing of a tree combine to make a convincing package, I think. Except for this one thing:

Under five minutes to read.

Until they give away Wi-Fi in airports and aboard planes, I can’t keep clicking on the re-load button every couple of minutes. (This could be solved with an option to download 10, 20, 100, etc. pages.)

Then I got to wondering if a Mike Lawson-type book could be had anywhere else. I went to Barnes & Noble first, keyed in “ebooks,” and got this message:

Our eBooks Store is Closed.
B&N.com no longer sells or provides support for eBooks. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause.

I’m not terribly inconvenienced (there are always options on the net), so I wondered if it was really B&N that was inconvenienced about how to price and distribute ebooks.

Next stop, Amazon. Okay, they have lots and lots of selection, but only if I own a Kindle, which I don’t. I have an iPod Touch. And I have actually read books on it, not to mention the papers every day but Sunday.

My favorite site for the Touch is TextOnPhone.com. Yes, it’s also exclusive – only for the iPhone and Touch. It’s also free, and I can make a reading list to dip in and out of. Short stories work the best for this. TextOnPhone allows me to download in 4-page segments, and up to 50 pages at a time. I can, however, download several 50-page segments at once if I’m planning to be off the Wi-Fi for a while. I can also choose the font and size for best reading.

My last research operation was to price a book at several different sites. Here are the least expensive options for The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins.

DailyLit – Free
Barnes & Noble - Unavailable
Amazon - $2.97
TextOnPhone – Free
ebooks.com (MicroSoft, Mobi and Adobe readers only) - $5.95
Project Gutenberg – Free

Hmmm. What do you think?