Tweet your way to literary stardom

In the latest race-to-the-bottom trend of cultural idiocy, books composed of Tweets by users of the popular website Twitter seem to be catching on. HarperCollins’ new imprint, IT Books, is publishing one, called Twitter Wit, but, according to GalleyCat, they’ve been beaten to the punch by a self-published author named James Bridle. Described as an “e-book pioneer,” Bridle has produced the volume, entitled My Life in Tweets, using the online print-on-demand service Lulu.com.

Admitting that most of the book “doesn’t mean anything” to anyone other than the author, Bridle says that he was interested in preserving the collected wisdom of two years’ worth of 140-character musings:

When Twitter is inevitably replaced by something else, I don’t want to lose all those incidentals, the casual asides, the remarks and responses. That’s all really.

The book covers the period between Feb. 2007 and ’09 and, in what is either a display of unbridled optimism or pure narcissism, the cover claims it’s Volume I.