The Rooster app launched this week, with "the backing of some of the biggest names in the tech industry," the Washington Post reported, asking "what if your iPhone could recreate the excitement--and convenience--of reading a novel in serial form?"
Each month, Rooster will send two novels--a classic tale and a contemporary story--to a customer's iPhone "in manageable installments, according to a schedule you set yourself," the Post wrote. Debut titles are Herman Melville's Billy Budd and a literary thriller, I Was Here, written specifically for the format by Rachel Kadish.
Media tech company Plympton owns Rooster as well as DailyLit. The Post noted that "as quixotic as Rooster sounds, some Web-savvy people have put their money behind it, including Alexis Ohanian, co-founder of Reddit; Joshua Schachter, founder of Delicious; Adam Goldstein, CEO of Hipmunk; Andrew McCollum, co-founder of Facebook; Charlie Cheever, co-founder of Quora; and James Hong, co-founder of HOTorNOT. Do these gazillionaires know something about the marketability of classic novels that the rest of us don't?"
