Appropriately enough Don Quixote, the hero of hopeless causes, is being brought to Twitter via a project titled Twijote.
It sounds as daft as tilting at windmills, but perhaps there is more to this year-long project than meets the eye. The scheme aims to publish the 470 pages of the first volume of Don Quixote’s adventures using the 140 characters allowed by Twitter.
The aim is to bring the Cervantes classic to a new, younger, more sound bite-led audience. The scheme is the brainchild of Spanish web designer Pablo López who iss setting out to demonstrate that literary culture can exist in social media and that twitter is not just a “place for nerds and freaks”.
The project will need 8,200 individual tweets and will take one year to complete.
Volunteers from largely Latin countries such as Spain and Argentina have already signed up to help the project by offering to submit a book tweet.
Twijote has no sponsors and does not aim to make any money – but does it show what can be done by brands and publishers?
“It is something we put up to see what would happen,” said Lopez, who pulled in web designers from his company to help. “I had the idea one day and came into the office and persuaded people it was worth doing.”
Comment:
Yes, it’s not actually sponsorship, or even a genuine partnership or collaboration, but it does provide creative stimulus when it comes to pushing books through new media and utilising the power of the very latest technologies that are so often cited as the death of the book.
Bringing a classic work of fiction, perhaps the first ever novel, to this new medium could easily be dismissed as a dumb and lightweight objective. But brining readable bite-size bits of the book to the masses through this social media platform may find an entirely new audience.
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