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A good blog isn't the same as a good book
Read any good blooks lately? A blook, according to the self- publishing website lulu.com, is any book with content that was developed in a significant way from material originally presented on a website. So, Belle de Jour: The Intimate Adventures of a London Call Girl, is a blook, as is the rather less seductive BiodieselPower by Lyle Estill, which had its origins in a site devoted to greener kinds of fuel. And though these two titles would be unlikely to find themselves on the same shelf in any bookshop, they both feature on the non-fiction shortlist for the 2006 Lulu Blooker Prize, the winner of which will be announced next Monday. Since only printed and bound books are eligible - and since lulu.com is in business to bridge the gap between virtual books and the kind you can hold in your hand - it's likely that this has more to do with marketing than with any seismic shift in literary culture.
But it isn't the only sign that trickle-up publishing, as you might call it, is beginning to make its mark. Yesterday it was announced that a blook had also made it to the shortlist of the considerably more prestigious and rewarding Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction, which offers pounds 30,000 to the winning title, rather than the Lulu Blooker's $4,000 (pounds 2,300). Baghdad's Burning, by an anonymous Iraqi woman, is a published form of a long-running blog about the Iraqi occupation - which now finds itself competing with books such as Alan Bennett's Untold Stories and Kathryn Hughes's biography of Mrs Beeton.
The Blooker Prize site describes blooks as "an exciting new stage in the life-cycle of content", which makes you think of something larval swimming to the surface, unfurling its wings and finally achieving biological apotheosis. The news coverage of the nomination of Baghdad's Burning also seemed to suggest that the blog was just an intermediate stage to something fully formed and grown-up. But do all blogs dream of becoming a book? More to the point, can they properly be judged alongside them? The satisfactions of a great book include a sense of time distilled - and of a shape bestowed on the subject matter, so that the endlessly accumulating pile of facts and experiences is rescued from its own randomness.
The satisfactions of a great blog are quite different. They deliver an intimacy and immediacy which can be simulated in a book, but never quite so freshly - and their provisional nature is crucial to that. For one thing, you never really know when a blog will end - so each new posting delivers the satisfaction of a soap episode. And messiness of structure or style isn't a defect but a badge of authenticity. Baghdad's Burning isn't remarkable for its literary technique, but for the absence of technique - for the sense that the entries have been hammered out while the heart was still hammering too.
That isn't a negligible quality at all - and it's intriguing to see that the most successful blooks so far essentially draw on the oldest alibi for fiction - that of epistolary construction - the only difference being that these letters are sent out to anyone who wants to read them. But when you put any good blog into print and between hard covers, something about it is lost. You are reminded of the other meanings of the word "bind" - as something free is fettered and something fluid congeals. Blogs and books are both prize worthy - but if you pretend they're interchangeable you miss the point of both of them.
Copyright 2006 Independent Newspapers UK Limited
Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning Company. All rights Reserved.
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