Reading books on Twitter? A newspaper for your exact location?
Posted on 15. Jul, 2009 by Chris Matney in Book Publishing, Front Page Posts
Okay, nobody could have seen this one coming. TechCrunch today announced that Matt Stewart is releasing his novel The French Revolution on Twitter. Yup, it’s going to take him 3700 tweets and 480,000 characters to do it. Will it work? Why not. Will it be a new distribution method for books? I’m betting against it. Why is he doing it? Advertising – Mr. Stewart is looking for a traditional publisher for his book. Clever – it got my attention. But, is the book any good?
Another article, this time in Wired, focuses on a pretty neat concept. We all know that newspapers are struggling with the reality that information on the internet is free. Subscription-based models don’t really work because most articles get posted around quite a bit. Fine. This article discusses the fact that cell phones – an increasingly popular way to get news – broadcast their location. Additionally, cell phone users are accustomed to paying a fee for content. Combining these ideas, the article suggests that newspapers can broadcast location-specific news to consumers for a fee.
It’s a cool idea in many ways. My wife and I like to go driving in the mountains on the weekends – inevitably coming across a festival or event in full swing. It would be great to be able to check out the local news coverage to gauge our interest before swinging in or driving by. While these types of services already exist for quasi-static information like restaurant reviews and gas station locations, I am talking about dynamic news that takes a reporter and an editor. Of course, the real trick for Colorado would be to get cell phone coverage in the mountains – something that the carriers seem to incapable of doing well – but that is a different blog. Sigh.
A second idea that the article mentions is providing a specific electronic reader – like the one being developed by Hearst Corp. – free to subscribers as an incentive to continue their subscription. By eliminating the huge cost of printing and delivering a newspaper, the cost of doing this isn’t outrageous. “I’ll give you a Kindle, if you pay for a subscription to my newspaper” – this would definitely get some advertising impact. While I would hate to have a pile of e-readers to plow through in the morning news, there is a good idea floating in this concept somewhere.
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Here is a timely article: Google Books Is Trying To Get People To Read By Tweeting Out Literary Quotes
http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/07/15/google-books-is-trying-to-get-people-to-read-by-tweeting-out-literary-quotes/
Google Books has had a big month. The user interface got an overhaul with new tools and features, including new search features, and the U.S. Department of Justice formally announced the investigation of the settlement Google made with the Author’s Guild to make orphan books available on the web. Now Google is using Twitter as a vehicle to help you learn what books are available.
Under the “@googlebooks” Twitter handle, Google is posting excerpts from books in its index of works via popular or quirky book quotes. The Tweet we included is from Francis Bacon’s “Essays” compiled by Edwin Abbott.
Google says that they’ve chosen their favorite quotes from its list of the most popular passages of books (which you can find on each book’s overview page). If you click on the links in each tweet, you’ll be able to see the quote in context on the page.
I think Twitter, as a format, just doesn’t lend itself well to longer … anything. Might as well post the MS on a blog and tweet links to it, but reading a few sentences at a time (particularly 4700 potentially random times) just doesn’t appeal to me as a reader. I heard about this a month or two ago, also, and I just didn’t get it. It’s different, sure, and it gets attention, but where exactly does that attention go? What does it result in? Is there an actual call-to-action from tweeting a book?