Boston Journalist Starts Twitter Book Club

Most book clubs have just a handful of members. Jeff Howe's has more than 6,000 — and it's not even a day old.

Howe is a journalism professor at Northeastern University and the man behind a book club on the social networking site Twitter that's inviting anyone and everyone to join in.

The project is called 1book140; the "140" is a reference to Twitter's character limit for a tweet.

The way it works is simple: members go out and read a book — the first one is Margaret Atwood's novel "The Blind Assassin" — and then comment on it on Twitter. They mark all their comments with the same hashtag, a sort of indexing method on Twitter. That way, they can search for one another's comments.

WBUR's All Things Considered host Sacha Pfeiffer spoke with Howe about the book club on Wednesday, the day the online discussion kicked off.