One Book, One Twitter or #1b1t

by Jane Ciabattari | Apr-13-2010

Jeff Howe, a Nieman Fellow at Harvard who originated the term crowdsourcing, had an idea a couple weeks ago, based on how the NEA's Big Read program worked: "What if everyone on Twitter read the same book at the same time and we formed one massive, international book club?" Fast forward, Twitter time, and the 10 finalists are set and folks are voting now on Twitter, hashtag 1b1t and following Jeff @crowdsourcing. His dream: a good book as a trending topic on Twitter, an annual global summer read and discuss. Update here. Voting begins today, and goes on for two weeks.  Here are the choices (the top six are from the crowd, the next four from a panel of judges that includes Nieman Fellow and former NBCC board member Marcela Valdes):

1. American Gods, Neil Gaiman
   
2. Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury
   
3. 1984, George Orwell
   
4. Brave New World,Aldous Huxley
   
5. Slaughterhouse Five, Kurt Vonnegut
   
6. Catch-22, Joseph Heller
   
7. 100 Years of Solitude, Gabriel Garcia Marquez
8. Catcher in the Rye, J.D. Salinger
   
9. God of Small Things, Arundhati Roy
   
10. Song of Solomon, Toni Morrison