April Fools’ Day Jokes for Writers & Readers

By Jason Boog 

April Fools’ Day jokes flooded the Internets today, but we wanted to highlight a few gags that all the writers and readers in the audience would appreciate.

We’ll start with Twitter’s scheme to charge for vowels (see Twttr in action above):

Starting today, we are shifting to a two-tiered service: Everyone can use our basic service, Twttr, but you only get consonants. For five dollars a month, you can use our premium “Twitter” service which also includes vowels. We’re doing this because we believe that by eliminating vowels, we’ll encourage a more efficient and “dense” form of communication. We also see an opportunity to diversify our revenue stream.

In a somewhat related note, The Millions reported that Amazon has purchased the English language:

Plans are also in the works to acquire German, Spanish, French, and Mandarin Chinese, Bezos said, as well as several nonstandard dialects of English™, including African-American Vernacular English, popular among the highly desirable 18-25 upscale suburban demographic.

Novelist Maureen Johnson made a surprise announcement: “Really excited to announce that I am @HuffPostBooks new official YA author in residence! I’m just going to go there every day. To live.”

Writer Edward Champion reported on a breaking news where something happened.

Metafilter added some evocative graphics to the site’s usual text-based interface. (Via Sarah Weinman)

What was your favorite literary April Fools’ joke?