Blook: Qu'est-ce que c'est?

How does digital media reproduce what print media does, and how does it make something new? Audiobooks are a highly successful way of delivering a book's text to a listener rather than a reader: someone who is blind, someone who is driving, someone who likes the sound of the human voice and the experience of having someone read out loud, all welcome the audiobook.

The written text of a book can be hosted online, and the existence of digital libraries. Project Gutenberg is one of the oldest, in which books in the public domain are digitized and made available to the world as ebooks. These are works that originally appeared in print, as opposed to material created in a digital format or "born-digital." Some copyrighted material is also being made available in online formats by publishers. A book published by a University Press may also be housed online as a way to bring readers to that press's site or to promote scholarship in cases where the author sees the opportunity to keep the work alive, long after the usual print runs have ended.

But I just discovered the existence of a word I had never heard before today: blook. Here's the wiktionary definition:

1. A book serialized on a blog (weblog) platform.
2. A book about blogging.
3. A printed book containing content which first appeared on a blog.
* 2006: "'Blooks are the new books, a hybrid literary form at the cutting edge of both literature and technology,' said Bob Young, founder of self-publishing site Lulu which organised and sponsored the prize." US cook wins blogging book prize BBC Online, 3 April 2006.

But, as it turns out, the term has been in existence since before the advent of blogging, as the Wikipedia entry details: blook was a term coined to refer to objects made to look like books, but which were not (a shortening of "looks like a book". There is more than one contender for recognition as the originator of the term, but I'm more interested in learning about the variety of things to which it might refer. There is a "Blooker Prize for Blooks" (formerly called the Lulu Blooker Prize) that has been in existence for about 2 years, and serves as a great introduction to a number of "blooks" out there.

An expanded idea of the blook comes up in this article in the Guardian about a phenomenon in which writers of non-fiction books essentially keep writing: the dedicated book blog (what Graeme Thomson calls, with a wince, the "blook") but here he is talking about the extension of a bounded text (print object or its audio or visual reproduction) into a site that acts as a repository for related material or acts an extension of a conversation about it. "A new stage in the life-cycle of content" is what the Blooker Prize site calls it, and that will have to do for now.

Ana Clavel's two book related sites are examples of how the creation of a book also inspires the creation of art, installations, events, and post-publications conversations: Cuerpo naúfrago and Las Violetas son flores del deseo.

"A good book blog (or – must we? - "blook") becomes a supplementary text, a place to explain, elucidate, apologise, dig deeper."

He gives as one example the blog/blook of Alex Ross, the music critic for the New Yorker, has won The Guardian First Book award for a work of non-fiction for The Rest is Noise. His "blook" extends the book itself with audio files, a little video about the book, an archive of reviews, and other features that function, as Thomson says, like the special features of a DVD, and an expansion of the world referenced by the book over time.