A very cool service I recently discovered (hat tip possibly to @mdash but I’m not sure) is dailylit.com, which chops books into quickly digestible chunks and emails them to you (you can subscribe via RSS too) on whatever schedule you request: every weekday morning, for instance.
I’d been meaning to reread War and Peace for ages, but really, when do you get around to that kind of thing? Now I get a piece emailed to me every evening and I’ll be done by the end of the year. A long time to read a book, sure, but it’s in a few minutes a day, not several hours every week or two. Plus, it’s War and Peace.
Daily Lit offers classics (i.e. pre-copyright) for free and charges for newer books—about $3 to $7, it looks like. It’s an interesting business model and a creative (yet quite old-fashioned, I suppose, if you ask Dickens) way to repackage books.