Blooks - The New Books?

Blooks are the new books,

a hybrid literary form at the cutting edge of both literature and technology.

(Bob Young, founder of the print-on-demand publisher Lulu, 2006)

1. Introduction

Back in 2006, a phenomenon made its way from the depths of the World Wide Web into the newspapers: the so-called „blook“, a portmanteau word composed of the words „book“ and „(we)blog“, meaning a book written on the basis of a blog. The media were excited about these new kinds of books and looked to Japan, where blooks were already bestsellers. „Blook“ even made it into the shortlist of words that were considered to be included in the new edition of the Oxford English Dictionary in 2006 (Philipps 2006). If you search for „blook“ on Google in 2010, you are in most cases directed to archives and it will not take you long to find out that blooks have virtually disappeared from the Web. Despite the fact that weblogs keep thriving, blooks seem to be forgotten.

Considering this, it is not surprising to find out that no research has been done on blooks, while weblogs have been a subject of research since 2005. Research on weblogs often concentrates on how they changed journalism and communication in general, but never mentions the medium of blooks. Jenna L. Brinning and Jill Walker Rettberg gave good overviews of web-publishing and blogging, with Brinning stressing Habermas' “Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit” with regard to the opportunities of the Web and Rettberg taking into consideration the rise of “citizen journalism”.

This paper will try to find out what happened to blooks not only by examining this medium, but also by taking a look at its origins. The first chapter will deal with the definition of blooks as well as with the history of the so-called “blogosphere” from which the blook emerged. The second chapter will present some successful examples of blooks, show the diversity of subjects they deal with and analyze the reasons for their popularity. Chapter three will focus on marketing strategies and the overall reception of blooks by taking a look at the media coverage and an award especially invented for this genre. The last two chapters will then compare blooks to traditional narratives and eventually draw a conclusion concerning the development of blooks and their potential for success.

2. The Emergence of Blooks

Blooks are an idea that was born in blogs and online communities. In order to understand this medium, it is necessary to have a closer look at its origin in the blogosphere. By now, research on the blogosphere has made progress by the before- named publications of Brinning and Rettberg, but research on the medium of blooks simply does not exist. Except from articles in newspapers around 2006, the term “blook” is only mentioned within the blogosphere and therefore, the closer analysis of blooks requires at least an overview of blogs and how they are organized within the Web.

2.1 Definition of the Term “Blook”

According to Kerry Maxwell, the term “blook” is originally defined as “a book based on material from a weblog”. It can also refer to “a book which is serialized on a weblog, with chapters published one by one as separate blog posts” (Maxwell 2006). One similarity they share is the fact that they both represent a new kind of book, either by their content or by the way they are read: a blook based on a weblog emerges from the virtual world and bears its characteristic traits in regard to writing style, whereas a blook published on a weblog may be written like a traditional novel, but is instead read on the screen. Maxwell calls this the “transition from printed to electronic page”, which is in fact only true for books serialized in blogs. When the content of a weblog is published as a hardcover or a softcover book, it is not turned electronic in the first place, but rather made a traditional book again. According to Maxwell, this is a “bizarre twist […], as blogs, commentaries originating firmly in the virtual world, are becoming blooks, texts made of real bits of paper that you can hold in your hand” (Maxwell 2006).

2.2 Definition of the Term “Weblog”

In order to understand what blooks are about, it is necessary to go back to their roots: weblogs and the so-called “blogosphere”. According to a definition Jill Walker Rettberg gives in the Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory , a “weblog” is “a frequently updated Web site consisting of dated entries arranged in reverse chronological order so the most recent post appears first” (Rettberg 2009: 19). This definition only includes few characteristics of a weblog and can thus be true for a wide range of Web sites. Jenna Brinning's definition of a weblog picks up Rettberg's approach and renders it more precisely:

Ein Weblog ist eine Webseite, die aus betitelten, chronologisch fallend geordneten Einträgen unterschiedlicher Formate (Text, Video, Bilder und/oder Audio) besteht, wobei jeder Eintrag mit einem Zeitstempel versehen ist und über eine eigene URL, einen sogenannten Permalink, sowohl archiviert als auch abgerufen werden kann. Eine Kommentarfunktion, Trackbacks, interne und externe Links, die automatisierte Archivierung älterer Einträge und die Syndizierung durch RSS zählen zu den weiteren technisch-strukturellen Charakteristika heutiger Weblog-Softwaresysteme. Durch die Einführung der Verschlagwortung mit Tags […] ist mittlerweile eine weitere organisatorische Möglichkeit entstanden, einzelne Beiträge zu sortieren, und zwar inhaltlich statt nur chronologisch. (Brinning 2008: 63)

Both definitions clearly focus on the technical aspects of weblogs, but do not take into consideration their content. In order to distinguish weblogs from other kinds of Web sites, Rettberg quotes Evan Williams who names three characteristics typical of a weblog: “frequency, brevity and personality” (Rettberg 2009: 21). Weblogs are updated frequently and their authors tend to write brief entries, which mostly represent their subjective view of a particular topic. Moreover, most weblogs are written by an individual or a small group in the first person and they encourage their readers to leave comments on the entries or point to other Web sites by means of links (Rettberg 2009: 21 f.). Since these characteristics considering the content are as typical of a weblog as all the technical characteristics, Rettberg points to the definition of the term “weblog” in the Oxford English Dictionary, which joins her own approach with the characteristics mentioned by Williams: “[A weblog is] a frequently updated Web site consisting of personal observations, excerpts from other sources, etc., typically run by a single person, and usually with hyperlinks to other sites; an online journal or diary.” (Rettberg 2009: 22). In fact, the last part of this definition, which equates a weblog with an online journal or diary, is not quite correct since online journals or diaries are only genres within the medium of weblogs¹. This equation is only true for the first weblogs which appeared in the middle of the 1990s and paved the way for a diversity of weblogs later on.

2.3 The History of Weblogs

Not only online diaries were precursors of the weblog we know today, also personal Web sites and commented link lists which point to interesting Web sites are said to be forerunners of all kinds of weblogs (Schmidt 2008: 115). Brinning even traces them back to sources outside the Internet: “Neben der persönlichen Homepage werden auch Logbücher, Pamphlete, Wunderkammern, persönliche Journale, Tagebücher und Chroniken zu den Vorreitern des Weblogs gezählt.” She also mentions fanzines as probably the most direct ancestor of the weblog and thus agrees with Rettberg about the importance of print sources for their development (Brinning 2008: 98, Rettberg 2009: 42).

In spite of this seemingly direct line of precursors, the history of weblogs can by no means be called “linear” or “goal-oriented”: when weblogs became popular, this was not the end of all personal Web sites, but still some of their characteristics are preserved in weblogs. Personal Web sites as well as weblogs are published by a single person or a small group, they are available for and addressed to the public and share some technical characteristics, such as hypertextuality. The most important difference between these mediums is the way the publisher's personality is represented: personal Web sites only allow a static or stable representation of the self and rather function as a kind of virtual business card, whereas weblogs are updated very frequently and almost mirror the daily mood of the author (Brinning 2008: 97, Rettberg 2009: 23).

The rise of the weblog began in the middle of the 1990s with online diaries written by single persons: in 1994, Claudio Pinhanez started his Open Diary , which was published by the Media Lab of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology until 1996. A more famous example of an online journal is Justin Hall's page Links from the Underground , which was launched in 1996 and shut down in 2006. This Web site did not only consist of a personal journal, but also of a commented link list. Another example of a very early online diary is Carolyn Burke's Web site Carolyn's Diary which she started in 1995. At first, keeping an online diary was a quite solitary business. This changed in 1996 with the invention of Open Pages , the first Web ring for online journals consisting of a collection of links leading the user to various online diaries (Nowak 2008: 54 f.). Web rings still exist and are used today, but now offer a wider range of functions:

Often diarists belong to Web rings linking diaries together, or they write on social sites like LiveJournal, where they can set up friendlists and share sections of their diaries with specified friends or groups of friends. In these cases, the blog is often only meant as a way of communicating with close friends. (Rettberg 2009: 11 f.)

Weblogs as online diaries do not only facilitate communication, but they also enable their authors to write about their place in society and share their observations of everyday life with others (Nowak 2008: 53). In this respect, they are related to logbooks and it is no surprise that this is exactly the medium that weblogs got their name from:

The word blog is a contraction of the words Web and log. Blogs have developed considerably since the word was first used about a Web site in 1997, but the basic sense of a blog being some kind of log, kept on the Web, remains. The word log is taken from nautical navigation, and originally referred to a chronological record of events during a sea journey: tracking speed, weather, course and so on. […] Today, other information is also entered into the logbook. Weblogs have retained the chronological organization of the ship's logbook, although their content is less ordered and less systematic than the conventional logbook. The implicit transfer of the navigation metaphor to the Web is fitting, as people in the nineties tended to talk about navigating the Web. (Rettberg 2009: 18).

Before weblogs came into existence, the term “weblog” referred to the traffic to a certain website, meaning the number of total hits the site had received, the number of individual users who had visited that site and other information of that kind. The first time the word was used to refer to a new medium was in 1997, when Jorn Barger launched his link blog Robot Wisdom: A weblog by Jorn Barger . “Weblog” was reduced to “blog” in 1999, when Peter Merholz announced on his weblog PeterMe : “I've decided to pronounce the word 'weblog' as wee-blog. Or 'blog' for short.”. Merholz' blog also represents another kind of blog which was among the early forms: the commented link list. Unlike most other link lists that simply consist of links to other interesting blogs or websites, however, Merholz embedded interesting links in more essayistic posts (Rettberg 2009: 24-26). Nevertheless, not all simple link lists developed into complex blogs discussing the links they present, as Rettberg points out:

In part, this would seem to be a historical development from weblogs as sparse, minimal lists of links to weblogs as sites where writers pull ideas together from different Web sites and weave links into miniature essays. But in fact, both kinds of blog post have existed in parallel. (Rettberg 2009: 26) This parallel development again proves the history of blogs to be quite ramified.

Nevertheless, it is safe to say that a particular invention brought forward the popularity of blogs: so-called “blog hosts”, like Open Diary , LiveJournal , Pitas, Blogger and Manila , began to offer ready-made weblogs. They especially addressed people who wanted to share their thoughts online and who had too little technical knowledge to launch a Web site on their own. From around 1999 on, blogging took off with the help of these blog hosts and was promoted by media coverage (Nowak 2008: 57 f.). Thus, consumers underwent a quick change: many of those who used to read blogs in the beginning, began to write one themselves. This development illustrates the creative potential inherent in blogs since they do not only inform or entertain their readers, but also encourage them to react to the given information or to start blogging themselves (Nowak 2008: 61).

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¹ For a distinction between the blog as a medium and the blog as a genre see Rettberg 2009: 20 f.