Our generation lives a paradox. We have a far easier access to information than our elders did, and this led to us having a fair amount of curiosity. However, we simply don’t have enough time to read everything, discover everything, live everything.

No flying DeLorean (yet) to go back in time.

What we are going to talk about is a way to experience great authors’ works in short stories. Because literature is good for you: making you happier, smarter, healthier. MS Benefits

We have interviewed the founder of Morning Short, Michael Sitver.

MS Front

SubThe service sends you a short story everyday. The purpose is to let you experience the works of great authors without wasting time. The length of the story allows you to read it in the bus, subway, or simply with a hot coffee. Moreover, you spare the time of looking for the story yourself.

La Revue Y: How many people are there on the Morning Short team?

Michael Sitver, Founder of Morning Short: I handle all of the day to day operations myself. We have 50 volunteer curators that help us find stories, and for trade-specific tasks (i.e. design) I hire freelancers.

Y: How do you choose the extracts/novels you send?

MS: Each day’s story usually starts with an author. I decide upon an author, and then I sort through his or her catalogue of stories to find ones of suitable length, between ten and twenty minutes long. For most authors, this leaves me with a list of ten to twenty different stories. I start at the top of the list, and read through the stories until I find one I think readers will enjoy.

Y: What gave you the idea of this newsletter-like, daily-piece-of-literature providing service?

MS: Last year I came to realize that I was reading a lot of books, but very few that were fictional. I enjoyed the non-fiction books I was reading, but I felt that I was missing many of the great authors because I didn’t have time to read them.

I made it my New Year’s Resolution to read more fictional books, and I did indeed read more, but I still found myself struggling to get through whole books. I would have a busy week, stop reading a certain book, and find myself utterly lost when I got back to reading it.

Then I discovered short stories.

They were quick and easy to read, but they still allowed me to experience many of the world’s greatest writers.

Still, there were so many short stories out there that I struggled to find the best of them. I devised a little system for quickly finding good stories, and started finding stories I loved to read.

Creating Morning Short was a pretty simple progression from there. I talked to friends about the stories I was reading, and they told me that they’d had the same trouble, making time for reading. Seeing a need, I built Morning Short in 24 hours, and two months later here we are.

Y: Is it something that was somewhat linked to your studies or your work, or is it out of pure interest for literature?

MS: Pure interest.

Y: How many subscribers are there today?

MS: We’ve had almost 10,000 signups since we opened our doors.

FYI: In early January we’re releasing a Morning Short podcast. We’ve hired top-notch audiobook narrators to read our stories, and we’ll be releasing one audiostory every day for free.

In a nutshell:

To sum it up, Michael found a way to read the greatest authors in a minimum amount of time. Seeing he was not the only one having trouble finding enough time to read, he started Morning Short to share it.

The project is evolving, as the next step is to launch the Morning Short Podcast.

If you haven’t already done it, subscribe here.

Written by Julien Da Silva

Geek, bibliovore, touche à tout insatiable, tout est intéressant pourvu que ce soit présenté par des passionnés