Photo: Jon Snyder/Wired
It’s going to be tough for Mark Zuckerberg to break his New Year’s resolution this year. He’s got more than 130,000 people to keep him accountable.
Over the weekend, the young Facebook founder announced that this year he would read a new book every other week. Zuckerberg, whose audacious resolution last year was to learn Mandarin, settled on this new goal after soliciting suggestions from his millions of Facebook followers. On his Facebook page, Zuckerberg created a Facebook group and urged his followers to join his pseudo-book club, which had amassed 137,486 Likes and counting by Monday morning.
“I’ve found reading books very intellectually fulfilling,” Zuckerberg wrote. “Books allow you to fully explore a topic and immerse yourself in a deeper way than most media today. I’m looking forward to shifting more of my media diet towards reading books.”
The first book on deck is The End of Power by Moisés Naím. “It’s a book that explores how the world is shifting to give individual people more power that was traditionally only held by large governments, militaries and other organizations,” Zuckerberg writes.
The irony, of course, is that Zuckerberg himself is so powerful, that he’s just inspired thousands of people to read the same book overnight. In a sure sign of that power, the book is already sold out on Amazon. (Jeff Bezos, you can thank him later).
Comparisons are already being drawn between Zuckerberg and another powerful person: Oprah. Oprah’s Book Club, which ran 15 years strong, was a force in the publishing industry, garnering millions of members and causing book sales to skyrocket, a phenomenon that became known as “the Oprah effect.” Zuckerberg still has a long way to go, but with more than 31 million followers at his fingertips, the young CEO has a decent shot at filling her shoes.
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