Tweets by ‘Shades of Grey’ fans set for ebook

Fans of raunchy novel Fifty Shades of Grey are in for a treat, as an ebook with satirical Irish tweets about the book is on the horizon.

The ebook, which will be available for Kindle, will contain tweets using the Twitter hashtag #IrishShadesOfGrey, which proved enormously popular on the social networking site earlier this month.

Altogether, there were 6,000 tweets sent using the hashtag, which involved some provocative comments.

The ebook organisers, Alan O’Flaherty and Paul Duggan, took all of the tweets and narrowed them down to original content. They are now looking for permission from Twitter users to include up to 1,174 tweets in the ebook. Mr O’Flaherty said this is a lengthy procedure.

“Paul and I had a colour-coded system to sort original content from plagiarism. We marked a tweet as green if it was original, orange if we weren’t sure and red if we knew they just ripped the joke off from someone else,” he said.

“The ebook itself will be categorised into different sections, like regional, food, drink and sport. Turf is another one. I never knew so many people liked turf.”

Mr O’Flaherty hopes the ebook will be out before the end of August, with profits going to charity.

“I’d like to see the money go to a women’s charity, but I’m going to put it to a poll on our website and see what we get.”

It is hoped that if the ebook proves successful, a physical copy will be released, which Mr O’Flaherty is looking into.

Earlier this year, Fifty Shades of Grey broke kindle records and also became the fastest-selling paperback novel since records began.

* For more information on the ebook, see www.irishshadesofgreyebook.wordpress.com