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Media trends digest
– 2006
Read a good blook lately? (14 August)
 Amateur writers looking to get published are now turning to electronic journals in hopes that they will be turned into blooks.
Said to be the next revolution in publishing, blooks are books that started out their existence as a blog, the content of which has been significantly developed.
The hugely popular Blogger, LiveJournal and MySpace have become the new goldfields as publishing talent scouts are increasingly mining the e-journals for new material. Bloggers that have tried the more traditional channels of getting published are now finding that blogging can give their writing careers the kick-start it needs, and web publishing services such as Lulu.com are facilitating the budding writers’ transition into print. Bob Young, founder of Lulu.com and of the Lulu Blooker Prize, said he had been "staggered" by the response. "Blooks are the new books -- a hybrid literary form at the cutting edge of both literature and technology," he said. “Blogs have a fan base that can be quantified before a single book is printed…and bloggers have a cheap and accessible platform from which to sell their books,” claims Ben Macintyre in an expert analysis of this edgy new media.
“I had no idea what a blog was a week before I began,” said Julie Powells, winner of the first Blooker Prize in May earlier this year.
Her blook, Julie and Julia: 365 Days, 524 Recipes, 1 Tiny Apartment Kitchen describes her quest to cook all 524 recipes in Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking (1961), and is an irresistible combination of cookery and dry wit. Powell’s readers not only inundated her with comments and recipes, but some true enthusiasts even provided her with the necessary ingredients via post.
While more traditional publishers are evidencing a definite tendency to overlook or discredit blooks as ‘lowbrow’, there’s no denying their popularity. Also on the Blooker shortlist was Belle de Jour: The Intimate Confessions of a London Call Girl (Anonymous, 2004). As the title suggests, the book’s content is sexually explicit, and Orion may well have not bothered to give the anonymous ‘Belle’ a second glance if it wasn’t for the overwhelming amount of hits her weblog was receiving.
The Lulu Blooker Prize was originally launched to coincide with the 450th anniversary of the invention of the Gutenberg press, and greatly weakens the arguments of those who claim that the death of the book is nearing.
By Jana Raus
For more information see:
Blooker Prize
Times article
Guardian story
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