Unshelved by Bill Barnes and Gene Ambaum
comic strip overdue media

Friday, March 26, 2010

A great idea

What If Everyone on Twitter Read One Book?
The thought struck me that Twitter would provide a much better platform for a book club than the mere accident of physical proximity. Just think, we could supplant #howyouathug with #chapterfourexegesis in trending topics! Actually, no, we probably couldn’t, and that’s not the goal anyway. I love books. So do you. Let’s love one book together, our actual geographical location be damned.

Here’s how it’d go:

* Now: We collect nominations for what book we want to read. Take the Reddit poll at the bottom of this story to make suggestions and vote up and down the suggestions of others.
* Soon: We pick a winner out of the top selections. Why not just pick the one with the most votes? Because it’s not too hard to game the system. The final selection needs to be of general interest. It needs to be translated into many, many languages, and ideally it should be freely available.
* Soon after that: We start reading, and tweeting, and reading, and tweeting.

In the meantime, the hashtag for One Book, One Twitter is #1b1t. If you want to keep up-to-date, follow me @crowdsourcing.

So far it looks like Fahrenheit 451 is a clear favourite. What book would you like? Go to the link and vote!

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