Thursday, March 26, 2009

Picador's New Twitter Book Club


Picador has announced its plans to start a Twitter book club:

Every Tuesday we'll announce a new book club pick -- it might be mystery, literary fiction, work in translation -- and in two weeks we'll discuss the book on the following Friday. We'll try and pick books for every taste and reader. And to sweeten the pot, we'll even give away copies of the book during its announcement.

The first book selection is Yoko Ogawa's The Housekeeper and the Professor, and the discussion will begin on April 10th. Personally, I can't imagine how a discussion composed of "tweets" of a maximum of 140 characters each will be satisfying, but maybe I'm missing the point.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

That sounds like such fun! I'm actually now listening to a book "A History of the Middle East" and wondering how I could expand the review from "same old, same old." And BostonBibliophile improved on my review of The Glister by offering the one word reaction: "oy!" Definitely tweetable reviews!

Anonymous said...

It does seem to be taking your premise of a short review to the extreme! I can barely get a review out that's 140 words, never mind 140 characters...

I guess this is meant merely to collect people's immediate reactions to the books, rather than promote any kind of truly thoughtful discussion.

Lisa said...

I don't Twitter, but I have some friends who do and they are going to love this!

Meytal Radzinski said...

I'm of the internet generation and I cannot for the life of me see the need for this. I agree: what's the point of 140 characters talking about a book? This is just a gimmick. Some may get excited, but the actual merit is lacking.