Thursday, January 21st, 2010

LibraryThing 24-hour Readathon (beta)

Inspired by LibraryThingers participating in Do Nothing But Read Day, member squeakychu suggested we have our own event which doesn’t limit a day’s activity to just reading. (It was discovered that it’s really hard to do nothing but read, when the doorbell rings, or pets/children need tending.)

Thus was born the LibraryThing 24-hour Readathon*. The idea is to have LibraryThing members from across the world reading continuously for 24 hours. Each member is committing to reading for one hour, at a designated time. We’ve built in a redundancy system, in case someone is trapped in their car in a snowstorm … without a book. Some people will start on the hour, others on the half hour.

Date: Saturday, January 23rd
Time: You choose

If you’re interested, sign up here. You can read the development and ongoing rules of the Readathon on the Site Talk thread. You can direct any questions to that Talk thread as well. Once you’ve read for your hour, come describe it on the Book Talk thread.

This is an event for any LibraryThing member (and anyone you want to convince to read along with you), and the only requirement is that for the hour you sign up for, you read something (or listen to an audiobook).

This is the first of what we’re hoping to be many readathons. Future events may include reading a specific genre, reading for different increments of time (15 minutes, out loud?) or reading for longer amounts of time than 24 hours (how long can LibraryThing members keep reading? Years?)

*Beta. We’re using this first event as a kind of trial to figure it out.

Labels: readathon

4 Comments:

  1. Ed says:

    It would be cool to have ability for LTers to log in when they are reading and log out when they stop. Do you think members are continuously reading for days, weeks, months . . . on a routine basis?

  2. Sonya says:

    I'm sure there's a LibraryThing member reading somewher, most of the time, all year long.

  3. Anonymous says:

    So it's either an hour reading or listening to an audio book…I'm guessing I'm not allowed to cheat and watch the movie adaption?!

    (To be fair it is a challenge to watch a movie adaption of any book for an hour!)

  4. Addison Gast says:

    Can we write for an hour? I might be able to get my characters out of this jam being inprisoned in a wine cellar if possible.

Leave a Reply to Ed