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.
[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: Its output was described as "strangely poetic"[6] and as "cryptic missives that read like Zen koans which have been dropped on a computer keyboard from a great height".
[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.
[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.