Don’t believe what you read, says author and editor Jeff Howe in the Christian Science Monitor. “The Internet is not destroying literature.” If anything, he argues, “the new medium could breathe new life into a few old ones.”
To prove his point, earlier this month Howe kicked off “One Book, One Twitter,” which Howe hopes will become “the largest collective reading exercise in history.” As Howe explains in book industry trade magazine Publishers Weekly, “This summer, thousands of people from all over the world are reading Neil Gaiman’s ‘American Gods.’ They will then discuss the book using Twitter, a new-fangled technology that’s doing for the epigram what Anne Frank did for diaries.”
Howe says he got his idea from Seattle’s celebrity librarian Nancy Pearl who, in 1998, launched the “One City, One Book” group read concept, now adopted by many other municipalities as well.
Discussions in 140 characters or less…what are your thoughts?
One Book One Twitter
Been done:
Main Title: Twitterature : the world’s greatest books retold through Twitter / Alexander Aciman and Emmett Rensin.
Author: Aciman, Alexander
Rensin, Emmett
Imprint: London : Penguin, 2009.