Does it count as a book, if it is mostly written in snippets of 140 characters, with 60 protagonists and an aggregation of roughly 1,200 'tweets' broadcast on the Internet? Tweets From Tahrir, a racy account that tracks the fall of the Hosni Mubarak-regime through first-hand accounts of a group of Egyptian activists, raises important questions about social media, the nature of a revolution and its revolutionary, and of literature itself

Ten years ago, the concept of extracting knowledge from the realms of unverified, scattered, even fanciful material available on the web was a laughable idea. After all, who trusts an encyclopedia that could easily have been edited by a drunken wastrel with an Internet connection and a sudden desire to be erudite about rap music of the '70s? Not anymore.



As Tweets From Tahrir (edited by British journalist Alex Nunns and Nadia Idle, an Egyptian who was in Tahrir Square when the 30 year-long Hosni Mubarak regime fell on February 11, 2011) illustrates, there is no truer, richer documentation of real-time revolution than the 140-word outbursts of protestors caught in this decade's most inspiring uprising against tyranny.

Find out how Egypt rose from its pyramids to make a bid for a better life, through this compilation of tweets by its citizen journalists who used social media to organise, communicate and showcase the revolution that was unfolding at Cairo's Tahrir Square, before the world.

Extracts from Sunday MidDay's email interview with Alex Nunns, co-editor of Tweets from Tahrir:

How did the book come about? It's a novel concept.
The idea for the book came about when I was following the Egyptian Revolution on Twitter as it happened. My friend Nadia Idle, co-editor of the book, was in Tahrir Square, because she is Egyptian. But I was in England watching events on the news. The TV wasn't giving me the details I wanted. So I started following some Egyptian activists I knew about on Twitter, and what they were tweeting was just incredible. It was so full of emotion and drama, and it gave such a vivid picture of life in the middle of a revolution. As I was reading these tweets I started to think, "someone needs to document this stuff". So when Nadia came back to London, I suggested we make a book.

There has never been a book that uses tweets to tell a story. When we began, we didn't know if it would work. But when the tweets are put together it creates an amazing effect. The pace of the book is its strength -- because the tweets are short and succinct, it is easy to read them quickly. The events unfold very fast. That gives the book energy and drama.