Internet Book Clubs

Abstract

With over 252,000 subscribers as of July 2023, “Dracula Daily” has made newsletter-based internet book clubs a growing trend. Starting in 2021, artist Matt Kirkland decided to take advantage of the epistolatory nature of the beloved public domain novel Dracula to create an email newsletter that read the story in real time. On each day that Bram Stocker’s Dracula had a letter or diary entry dated, that section of the novel would be sent straight to subscribers’ emails, as if they were getting correspondence from Jonathan Harker himself (DraculaDaily 2023). While the first year had mild success, the 2022 read through became a viral internet sensation that inspired a wide variety of art, memes, and spinoffs (Connors 2022). Now in 2023, “Dracula Daily” is running its third year of reading Dracula in chronological order and has inspired a variety of different internet book clubs using the affordances of public domain to collectively read classical literature via email.