One Book, One Twitter, lots of excitement
Jeff Howe at Crowdsourcing asked the internet: 'What if everyone on Twitter read one book?' People answered - and the answer was not 'the internet will end.' It was much more exciting than that.
We're no strangers to books, words or innovative internet ways to help more people to enjoy them. With our enthusiasm for all sorts of Collective Nouns (project in progress - submissions deadline imminent!) and after organising the first Literary Twestival in 2009, it's clear that we enjoy a good tweet.
So we were quite excited to discover One Book, One Twitter. (That's '#1b1t' for those looking it up on twitter.com right now. It's okay. We'll wait while you open a tab and have a gander.)
Edinburgh-based readers might remember, in 2007, that Robert Louis Stevenson's Kidnapped was everywhere, in myriad forms, during UNESCO's campaign of the same name. This and other 'One Book, One City' schemes have been giving people something to talk about with random strangers on the bus - and, I should stress, many other benefits - since Seattle, 1998. Instead of one thing in common (geographical location), a lot of people suddenly have two things in common. Make an internet service (twitter) the common denominator instead and you have One Book, One Twitter.
The first book twitter users have voted to read is American Gods by Neil Gaiman. This is quite appropriate, seeing as @neilhimself is a regular user of the service and recently won a Publishing Perspectives Author Blog Award for his microblog on the site. On his journal, he said:
"As an author, I'm half-pleased and half-not, mostly because American Gods is such a divisive sort of book. Some people love it, some sort of like it, and some people hate it."
I can understand this. American Gods wasn't the first of Neil Gaiman's books that I picked up but it has the dubious honour of being the only one I haven't finished. My record so far is page 181 out of 635 despite thoroughly enjoying all one hundred and eighty one of those pages. Anyone else would blame this mystifying inability to finish the book on a low-level perception filter.
If you'd like to join me in the collective spirit of #1b1t, you can find out more by reading Jeff Howe's post on how to get involved here.
PS: It's all go, go, go on the internet. Mere hours after this went up, #1b1t got a twitter account of its very own at twitter.com/1B1T2010. Check it out.
Posted by Kayleigh Bohan on April 30, 2010.