#Lrnbk - A Twitter Book Club Experiment

(Image courtesy - Patrick Gage)

Do you read interesting books on learning and find wonderful snippets you’d like to share with your social network? Do you wish you could share far and wide? Did you ever wish you could discuss your reading experience with others? Do you like sharing book reviews? Do you like hearing from others who are reading a book that’s next on your list? Are you a learning professional looking to be part of a social experiment?

If you answered “Yes” to any of those questions, then you might be interested in what I have to say.

Here’s a little social experiment that we’d like to try. Who is we? By the royal “we”, I’m referring to Sahana Chattopadhyay and me. So here’s the back story. Over the last few weeks, we’ve been redefining the way we read, using our Kindles. For those who follow either of us, you’ll notice that we’ve been sharing on twitter, interesting snippets from the books that we read. Here are my items and here are Sahana’s. While we’ve been doing this in an ad-hoc fashion, we thought there could be a method to the madness and our inspiration was the hugely successful lrnchat.

So here’s what we’re suggesting. If you have anything to share about a book on learning, share it on twitter using the hashtag #lrnbk. Simple enough? No rules, no restrictions - just share whatever you feel is worth sharing, as part of your learning experience.

Possible Questions and Answers

What intellectual property rights should I be careful about?
When sharing excerpts from a book, please honour the author and the publisher’s copyright. Usually, sharing quotes and excerpts for the purpose of commentary, criticism, research, study and reporting are OK under the principle of Fair Use. Given twitter’s 140 character restriction, you should be on the right side of the law most of the time. The Kindle naturally protects the authors rights, by ensuring that it shares only a small section of your highlights.

What kind of stuff can I share on the hashtag?
Here are a few examples of what could go on this hashtag:

• interesting quotes from a book
• your observations when reading a book
• your questions about a book that you may or may not be reading
• book reviews

Then again, I’m limited by my imagination, so stretch yours and let’s see how far we can take this!

How do I share directly from my Kindle?
Sharing from your Kindle is very simple. Here’s how to set up your Kindle to share your notes and highlights.

Do I need to have a Kindle?
Absolutely not, though a reading device does make things a bit easier. If you have a paper book, feel free to share your thoughts via twitter all the same. If you wrote a book review for something you read on another ebook, just link it on twitter. The device isn’t the key - sharing is!

If you want the a bit of the Kindle experience but don’t yet have a Kindle, you can download the Kindle app onto your PC or iPod. While you can’t directly tweet from here, you can add notes and highlight the sections you like. Then, you could just link it on twitter.

How can I keep up with all the tweets on the hashtag?
Firstly, don’t pressure yourself to keep on top of everything. Share when you can, read when you can. With that said, if you did want to know what’s going on - we’ll publish a twitter paper each week. We’ll also ensure that we publish weekly transcripts to the lrnbk blog. Fair enough?

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So if that excites you enough, what’s holding you back? Let’s start sharing! Want more details? Post a question on twitter with the hashtag #lrnbk. If you have better ideas, share them on the hashtag too -- we’d like for this to be as easy as possible, so bring your thoughts to the table. And if you like this idea, be sure to tweet about it -- all good ideas need word of mouth publicity.