Photobucket - Video and Image HostingI was wandering the world wide web months back (pre Nano, naturally) and stumbled upon a whole new word: Blook. What was it? This from Lulu Blooker Blog:

blook (bluk), n. A printed and bound book, based on a blog (cf. web log) or web site; a new stage in the life-cycle of content, if not a new category of content and a new dawn for the book itself.

Hmm, interesting. I thought briefly about whether or not I could envision a Writer Unboxed blook. It could be nice, helpful even, to have all our favorite and most useful posts and interviews in one spot. On the other hand, why, really, would anyone want to buy a blook of posts when–with a little patient digging–you can read those same posts for free on the blog? How popular could this “new dawn for the book itself” be?

This from an article at Business Week Online:

Books based on blogs — dubbed “blooks” by Jeff Jarvis, a journalist and creator of the popular BuzzMachine.com — are making a big splash in book publishing. These range from novels to comics to memoirs… Some begin as blogs read by hundreds of thousands of loyal fans, land at well-known publishers, and end up sold through huge retailers from Barnes & Noble to Amazon.com. Others are self-published compilations. All may mean big changes in the way ideas find their way into print.

Recently our editor friend from Flogging the Quill, Ray Rhamey, asked about blooking. Would you be interested in a Flogging the Quill book? My immediate answer was YES. Because pretty much everything that comes out of FtQ is gold, and it would be helpful to have that gold in portable form for easy perusing.

So I’m asking–and Ray’s asking: what do ya’ll think of blooks? Hype or help? Would you use one? How? 

Therese Walsh co-founded Writer Unboxed in 2006. Her debut novel, The Last Will of Moira Leahy, sold to Random House in a two-book deal in 2008, was named one of January Magazine’s Best Books of 2009, and was a Target Breakout Book in 2010. She's never been published with a lit magazine, but LOST's Carlton Cuse liked her haiku best on Twitter, and that made her pretty happy.
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