Quake tweets make their way into memorial books

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http://search.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/nn20110620a3.html

When the magnitude 9.0 earthquake struck on March 11 and knocked out telephone lines across Tohoku, Twitter was flooded with messages as users tried to contact people in the disaster zone with words of both concern and encouragement.

Those words are now making their way into books as memorials to the nation's biggest postwar catastrophe.

"Pray For Japan," a printed version of the prayforjapan.jp website, was the top-selling book at Kinokuniya Bookstore in New York in May, while the paperback "Quakebook" hit bookstores in Japan in mid-June. Both are written in English and Japanese.

"Launching the website and publishing a book was my way of saying 'don't you dare forget that day,' " said Hiroyuki Tsuruda, a 20-year-old student who founded prayforjapan.jp. The book is primarily a compilation of tweets posted on the microblog about the disaster.