Getting A Booky Thing Going

Debra Hamel, the mind behind Buy a Friend a Book Week (which is next week, by the way), also created TwitterLit, which serves up "literary teasers." The teasers are the first lines of books, without the book's title or author. You can then follow a link to Amazon to find out where the line came from and read about the book. You can subscribe to TwitterLit and have new teasers delivered to you in a variety of ways twice a day.

It's sort of like a literary scavenger hunt.

Now Debra has created a new site called KidderLit that does the same thing for kids' books. The lines from 9/27's and 9/28's books come from cyberspace favorites.

KidderLit is probably going to attract a lot of adult kidlit book geeks. (I just subscribed.) But I think it's also an opportunity to make the literary world a little more attractive to kids. You're combining books with e-mail. If children are subscribed to the service, lines from books are going to appear on their computers without them having to make any effort. And, as I said, there's a game aspect to KidderLit. Today's first line is "The early summer sky was the color of cat vomit." Who's going to be able to resist finding out where that came from?

Worried that these links will be taking kids to Amazon, a shopping site? Teach them how to create Amazon wishlists with the titles they're interested in. Your children could actually end up asking for books for holidays and birthdays. And maybe it's time to encourage them to use the local library's website for searching for titles. They can move from Amazon to the library site to see if what they're interested in is available for free.

Those of you who frequent the School Library Journal website should watch for an interview there with Debra regarding KidderLit.