Horse Ebooks

[Peppin Kishore]

Horse_ebookswas a widely followed Twitter account and Internet phenomenon. Registered in 2010, the account was apparently intended to promote e-books but became known for its amusing non sequiturs in what seemed to be an effort to evade spam detection.[1]

On September 24, 2013, it was revealed that the @Horse_ebooks account had been sold in 2011 in order to promote an alternate reality game developed for viral marketing towards a larger art project by the art collective Synydyne and the release of Bear Stearns Bravo, a series of interactive videos about the 2007 subprime mortgage financial crisis.[2][3][4] The Twitter account has not been updated since.

Horse_ebooks was a part of a network of similar Twitter spam accounts which promoted e-books organized around a single theme. Based on investigations by Splitsider and Gawker, its creator was believed to be a Russian web developer and spammer named Alexei Kouznetsov[1][5] (Russian: Алексей Кузнецов, also romanized Alexey Kuznetsov[6]). Kouznetsov owned as many as 170 domains associated with similar efforts, some of which have been shut down or discontinued. Other accounts include companyebooks, action_ebooks and mystery_ebooks.[5] Horse_ebooks tweeted fragments of modified text copied from other sources, mixed with occasional promotional links to websites selling e-books that were associated with the affiliate marketing company ClickBank.[5] Examples include:

Unlike many other Twitter spam accounts, Horse_ebooks did not employ strategies of mass-following and unsolicited replies to Twitter users. Because it did not use typical spammer techniques, the account was not closed as Twitter spam accounts frequently are.[5] Before the revelation in September 2013, it had more than 200,000 followers.[8]

On September 24, 2013, it was announced that Horse_ebooks had become part of a multi-year performance art piece staged by BuzzFeed employee Jacob Bakkila. Bakkila had approached Kuznetsov in 2011 with the intent of buying the account; Kouznetzov agreed, and since 2011, Horse_ebooks had been operated by Bakkila.[4][9] This change was noticed by the account's followers when, on September 14, 2011, the account began tweeting "via web" instead of "via Horse ebooks", and the frequency of tweets promoting ClickBank significantly dropped while the number of "funny" tweets increased.[5] Many followers speculated that either the spam algorithm had been changed, or that the account had been taken over by a different person, possibly a hacker who acquired the account's password.[10] The same day Bakkila revealed the feed to be fake, he (as well as others who contributed to the project) performed at an art installation where fans could call in and have various horse_ebooks tweets read to them.[11] After the announcement, Bakkila stopped tweeting on the account.

Horse_ebooks has become the inspiration for fan art, fan fiction, and unofficial merchandise.[6] Among these are T-shirts[12] and Horse_eComics, a Tumblr blog featuring comic strips inspired by the account.[1]

Horse_ebooks was named one of the best Twitter feeds by UGO Networks in 2011[13] and Time.com in 2012.[14] John Herrman at Splitsider wrote that Horse_ebooks "might be the best Twitter account that has ever existed."[5] Writing for The Independent, Memphis Barker described Twitter as 'devastated' by the revelation that the account was human-run.[15] After the fictitious nature of the account was revealed, The Atlantic named Horse_ebooks "the most successful piece of cyber fiction".[16]

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ive said multple time that @horse_ebooks is my favorite contemporary poet, it did somthing very exciting with language, and released that language in a way that reached hundreds of thousands of people to make them laugh and smile. and it just kept going for so long, while everybody is saying various things about it, it just keeps on doing its WORK, keeps on puting out language that makes ppl laugh.. for years, every day !!! i apreciate that focus/ethic so much.. r.i.p. horse ebooks, maybe this means there can be a book collecting all the tweets now. as a poet i wil alway fight for @horse_ebooks's place in the canon of literture, one of the first great examples of internet poetry, inspration for many to folowview a colection (not nearly comprehensive) of my favorite horse ebooks tweets

If you're interested, I do have the original artwork for many of the comics, which are for sale. Also, I just printed (not exactly the best timing, I know) a mini Volume 2 collection that has 40 of these comics in it. Email me if you're interested in owning a bit of Horse_eComics art! :D

Well, here we are, folks. The end of days. As I'm sure you've heard, it has been revealed our beloved Horse has actually been a Buzzfeed employee for the past couple of years or so. Horse is being put out to twitter pasture. And as the spirit of Horse passes (untouched by all the negativity surrounding the revelation), I think it's only right to stop the comics.

They were, after all, based on the belief that a horse spambot was tweeting out silly, nonsensical, morbid and sometimes poetic material. That was really the inspiration behind the comics. Taking something rather bizarre and making it a little MORE so.

Here are some comics I had left in the queue to be posted. In a few minutes I'll post a couple more (including a guest comic), and then one final comic. I think y'all will like how I'm concluding Horse_eComics...

I had no idea that Horse was really a guy (or two) for the past couple of years. I always was greatly entertained at the thought of a spambot generating random, silly and sometimes poetic tweets. I really enjoyed making comics that added even more craziness upon that. And now that Horse is done, so are the comics. I'm going to make one final post soon. But thank y'all so much for reading the comic and being so supportive. I'll definitely try and get something new going soon.

And I've been hard at work on the second Horse_eComics mini book! There are FORTY comics in it, which is double what Mini Volume 1 had. And I'm having this one professionally printed, so it'll have a fun color cover.

[Female speaker]: "Horse ebooks. It's morning in cyberspace and the systems are in love. A spambot and a channel--what would the parents think? Together again. It's all just data in the 'net, but we are just getting started. ''

This is the world we're in, and this is what is happening. What's that tune? Everyone is singing. You are first class. You are ready. And you are the Regulator who will see the shining data in the stars of Bear Stearns Bravo.

I have a copy of iBooks on a work iPad that I was able to download for free, and decided to research how books are displayed as an electronic copy. A search in the store for horse brought up many books that are available to download for free!

You will find equine careers profiled on this blog and people interviewed who are making a career in the horse industry. Equus Education aims to show others that horses can indeed be a sustainable career.

@Horse_ebooks[1] is the companion Twitter account for Horse-Ebooks.com[2], an ebook store that is part of the e-Library Network.[3] The network hosts between 170 and 197 other ebook sites with similar Twitter accounts. Owned by Alexei Kuznetzsov, the Horse eBooks site was registered on November 26th, 2009 and the Twitter handle was registered on August 5th, 2010. One of the earliest documented and shared tweets was made on February 6th, 2011 (shown below).

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