Swotter
A new kind of talking book.
About Swotter
Booktwo, says the mission statement, exists to explore the intersections of literature and technology. Having recently been caught up in the swirl around Twitter, I’ve been bending my mind around ways to bring something bookish to the twittering masses. This is it.
Swotter reads books to Twitter, and via Twitter to the world. You can listen to Swotter via the web, via Instant Messenger, or via SMS messenger on your mobile phone. Soon, there will probably be even more options.
The booktwo Swotter
Booktwo is currently using Swotter to read James Joyce’s Ulysses to the world. Aside from it being one of our favourite books, it also contains enough strangeness to make anyone coming across it at random pay attention. Possibly.
You can see how it’s getting on at http://twitter.com/booktwo. If you’d like to subscribe, get a twitter account if you don’t have one, and make friends with booktwo.
Ulysses, in the Gutenberg plain text edition, has 24765 lines. Reading one every fifteen minutes, it is going to take 257 days (about eight months) to read Ulysses to Twitter. Swotter started reading on the 28th of February, 2007, so should finish around the middle of November.
Some thoughts
One of the main inspirations behind Swotter was “baudri-r”, an online project by the artist Annabel Frearson. Frearson typed the text of Jean Baudrillard’s In The Shadow Of The Silent Majorities into internet chat rooms.
baudri-r.com is no longer online, but you can read Stewart Home’s interview with Annabel Frearson here. (It’s also discussed in his forthcoming novel, Memphis Underground, which I am - full disclosure - the publisher of).
Running over a period of several months, Swotter will test the permanence of the electronic medium against that of the traditional book. It also poses several challenges: to what extent can we fragment (or microchunk, in the latest parlance) literature before it becomes incoherent? How many media can literature be forced into - if, indeed, there is any limit?
It’s a simple concept, with many ramifications. I look forward to seeing the discussion (if there is any…) and the other uses to which Swotter can be put (likewise).
Running Swotter
Swotter is a simple php script. In fact, it is my first piece of php code, so it’s pretty rough - but that also implies that anyone can get it going. Any tips on tidying it up would be much appreciated. There’s a little zip for downloading:
[Note: There's a counter file in there, although you can create this yourself pretty easily though - again, a better coder probably wouldn't need it.]
Put these two files in a directory on your server, together with the file you want to read. Remember, the maximum length of a twitter message is 140 characters, so each line, which Swotter reads in turn, should be no more than this. Make the changes indicated in swotter.php, and schedule a cron job to hit swotter.php as often as you want a line read.
Thanks to Paul Stamatiou for the php-to-twitter code, and Vision Internet for their usual high-quality support.
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Designed and built by 
[...] a twitter bot that reads out James Joyce’s Ulysses, line by line. According to its creator’s site: Ulysses, in the Gutenberg plain text edition, has 24765 lines. Reading one every fifteen minutes, [...]
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[...] is reading a book via Twitter to the world. You can listen to Swotter via the web, via Instant Messenger, or via SMS [...]
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. I’ve been enjoying “Ulysses” for a while and thought I’d pop in to tell you how much I appreciate reading you on Twitter.
[...] new tweet appears; instead, it shows several tweets on the map and it’s updated every minute. Swotter A contestant for the weirdest Twitter mashup out there, Swotter is “reading” books to [...]
Ping from the Unofficial Twitter Community and Forums. We will let our members know about your readings!
http://www.twitterforum.com
Bob Ladow is using Swotter to read a bedtime story through Twitter every evening.
Wonderful way to use technology. I’m suddenly starting to find that Twitter has more potential than I originally thought.
[...] the implications and possibilities here are pretty nifty. It’s like the “read classics via email” project, but I think the aspiring hypertext author could do some rather nifty things with this tool. [...]
I think it’s a good idea for the classics to be in our attention-challenged world. On the other hand, I don’t like it that swotter is line-oriented instead of sentence-oriented. I don’t like it that sentences are spread across tweets. I suggest that the next iteration of Swotter have some kind of facility for noticing sentences.
Douglas - I do agree. Been meaning to do this for a while, and will when I have a mo - the next evolution in my PHP skills…
Excellent project, had the same idea myself (was going to use The Kalevala) and then noticed you had already done it. One thing though… it doesn’t seem to be reading one sentence at a time, more like 13 words at a time which breaks the flow. It’d be great to be able to just read a sentence… if you e-mail me I may be able to help you set it up to work that way.
Great idea!!!! It takes till forever to read a book this way, but I like the idea of using an old ‘medium’ in a new one. Very original to use technology this way.
[...] booktwo.org » Swotter http://booktwo.org/swotter/ [...]
[...] Swotter - “A new kind of talking book”. Swotter is a unique application that reads books to the world via Twitter! Check it out here. [...]
[...] It just finished reading Ulysses aloud. It is awesome. [...]
[...] tags: twitter books ideas innovation literature technology publishing [...]
is this a fully automated program? not bad. maybe i will use Swotter too.
[...] am not joking. You can now read books with Twitter. Swotter reads books to Twitter, and via Twitter to the world. You can listen to Swotter via the web, via [...]
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[...] Not content with an excellent blog about books and technology, he has his fingers in lots of book related pies. All of them good too. He’s clearly trying to make the rest of us look lazy, and [...]
http://hughgarry.typepad.com/hugh_garry/2008/08/telling-stories.html
Another way of telling stories with Twitter