ben white

Thanks Jason. Alas, no royalties, but contributors did receive a free copy of the book.

Twitter does not claim ownership over the content of individual twitter-streams (rightly so) and writers still own their own material, though by submitting, one grants Nick (the editor) and HarperCollins these rights:

By submitting information to Twitter Wit, you grant Twitter Wit a perpetual, royalty-free license to use, reproduce, modify, publish, distribute, and otherwise exercise all copyright and publicity rights with respect to that information at its sole discretion, including storing it on Twitter Wit servers and incorporating it in other works in any media now known or later developed including without limitation published books and related items and in the advertising and promotion thereof. In every appearance of your message, you will be credited by your Twitter username.

So they can do whatever they want with submitted tweets as long as they credit the author. Then again, a ten dollar book for 140 characters I wrote anyway is a decent deal in my mind.

Thanks for the kinds words, Doug!

There’s a link to Twitter Wit on Amazon in the post (it’s the underlined book title—just realized that might be confusing by itself since book titles are always underlined or italic. Oops). I’m still working my way through it, but I plan to post some more thoughts on this entertaining Web 2.0 bathroom reader.

Agreed. Besides, the point has been made that a $10 book is actually “worth” more than the royalties of the book would be when split between several hundred people, and that could very well be true depending on how well the book sells.