Tweets Inspire a Book on the Egyptian Revolution

Celebrities use Twitter to rave about who they're sitting next to at the Oscars, teens use Twitter to 'follow' the celebrities, and the remaining account-holders use Twitter to let everyone else know exactly what they're doing at any given moment of the day. However this January and February Twitter became much more than a social network to let your friends know what you had for breakfast — just ask the thousands of young activists in Egypt whose tweets resulted in an unprecedented method of recording history as it happened right before their eyes.

Tweets from Tahrir documents each day of the violent revolution in Egypt that ended hundreds of lives, focusing on the uprisings in Cairo's Tahrir Square. The twist: every word and picture of the book is taken from tweets posted by Egyptians either in the heat of conflict or prior to staging a revolution, capturing instant reactions to the demonstrations like no other form of journalism has been able to. Quite the change from updates about Lady Gaga's outfit.

Activists Alex Nunns and Nadia Idle edited the 160 pages full of uncensored fear, distress and eventually the excitement of victory, and have organized the 140-character tweets into chronological order, allowing readers to fully grasp the ups and downs of the historic events as they happened. This groundbreaking compilation of 'citizen journalism' will be published on April 21, and readers will be able to experience the drama and ecstasy of the story as it unfolded.