I was just surfing on Amazon and decided to see what books were surfacing on the topic of Twitter.
While Twitter is mentioned in many book about the broad category of social media – there are a few new books specifically written about Twitter – including a few that are available for Pre-Order.
Here are those books with Twitter in the title (not including books about birds…) arranged in order of how they’ve been selling (including pre-sales of books yet to come out – I’ve noted those that are yet to be released):
- Twitter Revolution: How Social Media and Mobile Marketing is Changing the Way We Do Business & Market Online (November 2008 – pictured right)
- Twitter means business: how microblogging can help or hurt your company (November 2008)
- Twitter Power: How to Dominate Your Market One Tweet at a Time (Available for pre-order – Out in February 2009)
- Twitter: Free Social Networking For Business – 100 Success Secrets To Increase Your Profits and Sales Using Twitter Business Strategies (November 2008)
- Twitter API: Up and Running: Learn How to Build Applications with the Twitter API (Available for pre-order – Due in March 2009)
- Twitter For Dummies (Available for pre-order – due for release in June 2009)
- Twitter Top Success Secrets and Best Practices: Twitter Experts Share The World’s Greatest Tips (December 2008)
Also of note is Joel Comm’s Twitter Secrets Kindle Book – which ranks in the middle of this list.
@tumblemoose
That seems to fall in most publishing timeframes. Although I would say that Twitter and Twitter apps have changed so much just in the last 60 days that any book you buy now is going to be a bit dated
George
@hbixler03
They look pretty interesting.
@hectorhenry17
Good pots onfurtunaly i dont buy book am traing to imporve my english reading and i have a lot to read in internet free.
@amauiblog
if I can only afford one book, which one do you recommend?
Liza
@deege
Are the chapters 128 characters or less?
@BJMendelson
Wow. This reminds me of all those SEO and other search engine related books that came out and quickly went out of date as soon as they hit the shelves. Great for mainstream audience acceptance for Twitter, but disappointing at the same time when all of the information is free online.
@ElizabethPW
Funny thing is that some of those authors are not really great twitter users with demonstrative results from using twitter in particular — they just have a big twitter following b/c they have a big email list of people to draw from … and a few are primarily self-promoting self-linkers.
I still love and read old-fashioned books … but for strategy, stories, and evergreen topics. For cutting edge high tech, blogs/articles/ebooks/forums are best b/c they can keep up with the technology.
@openspirit
Personally,i dont like for dummies titles. i will definitely go for book no5 “twitter api” as i’m web developer.
@joelcomm
Thanks for the mention, Darren. You are actually IN Twitter Power, due in stores February 17th-ish. None of the titles that are already out have received any kind of widespread distribution. My publisher is going to see to it that Twitter Power changes that.
@thomasflight
Each book is 140 paragraphs or less… LOL.
@DrShock
Written a review recently about one of these books: Twitter: Free Social Networking For Business – 100 Success Secrets To Increase Your Profits and Sales Using Twitter Business Strategies
You can read it here: http://tinyurl.com/67bhoe
Kind regards Dr Shock
@bradhart
As an author I am not sure why I get so frustrated with so many books being published, but in the end I still find myself asking why we need so many technical books about things already on the internet. The grand hope internet was supposed to be free information or at least free access to it, but here we are in an age with dwindling environmental resources yet creating tons of dead tree publications about subjects that can only be accessed online. I understand and approve of the fact we will always have books in print, but it seems absurd and obscene to have thousands of pages of printed material about twitter when there are thousands of websites about twitter.
Maybe it is because I read books for enjoyment and download tech information to my computer or Palm Pilot, but I just have a hard time with the concept of pouring a glass of wine, running a bath and having a good relaxing moment with Twitter Power: How to Dominate Your Market One Tweet at a Time or any of the others.
@openspirit
@joel
looking forward to your book.
I was just thinking I needed a Twitter for Dummies book and it looks like there’s one coming out soon. Thank goodness – I’m so lost on Twitter.
@nicolesimon
I hope you can add a section of non english books ;o)
I am the lead author of “Twitter – Mit 140 Zeichen zum Web 2.0″ which roughly translates to “Twitter – with 140 characters to Web 2.0″ and is a complete guide for newbies as well as more experienced users, covering everything from an overview of the twitterverse and its history, over first steps to your own account, a reference chapter for settings as well as a chapter on twitter versum. To make this book usable for both business and personal use we put the content on how to use Twitter for business in a separate chapter.
Published in December 2008, 235 page and doing quite well on Amazon Germany.
http://www.amazon.de/exec/obidos/ASIN/3937514740/twitterbuch-21
The link on my name leads to the overview page with the table of contents and I love input for the second edition.
@ahsimpson
Love the blog BTW -I saw @jamesdickey mention your post about blip and it brought me here. Ahhhh – just what i need – another great read into my RSS folders
I’ll try to keep up with your postings honest 
Personally i kind of laugh when i see twitter guidebooks:
1: create account
2: Find people you think are interesting
3: Tweet
4: Have Fun
5: Be Yourself (Business or personal – the old “Do unto others” thang folks)
6: Add new “friends”
7: Repeat
And thats about it – its not rocket science. LOL
(The way twitter’s codes been acting of late – thank goodness it’s not rocket science:)
A book about twitter could almost be written in 140 characters or less – its that simple!
I’m sure the books out there are great and insightful – but really – what next “The pop-up toaster handbook?”
Keep up the good work.
Alex, you would be surprised how much rocket science it is for many people. I agree with you, that for an experience person there should not even be a need to look up 140 characters about it. As such a person you should be able to login and just get everything in some minutes.
But fact is, most people are not that way and they are very happy about having a guideline on how to do stuff. Reading a book for a few hours and being guided helps them to enter this space quicker and in a more secure way. Secure for us that is. So that they dont do all the stuff we know they should not do.
And tell you what, explaining how to best set up your account, what the different switches mean, how to add tweets from different sources and just how to understand why certain replies show up on the reply tab or not – you can explain that in a way everybody understands.
When I went for a more basic approach with the book, I was really unsure if that was not too basic, but the respsonses from readers have been overwhelmingly positive and included many “thank you” feedbacks because somebody took the time to explain it to them.