From Blog To Book: The Blooker Prize

Susan Best from Best PR sent me an email earlier this week about the blooker prize. According to the press release I saw a Blooker prize is...

"blook n. blook. A printed and bound book, based on a blog (cf. web log) or website; a new stage in the life-cycle of content, if not a new category of content and a new dawn for the book itself. cf. The Lulu Blooker Prize, ("The Blooker"), a literary prize, founded 2005, for blooks. [der. Eng. book, a bound collection of sheets of paper.]"

Basically, the whole Blooker deal is a marketing tactic by Lulu...

"...the world's fastest growing source of print-on-demand books. Founded by Bob Young, who previously co-founded Red Hat, the open source software company, Lulu provides independent publishers with free access to on-demand publishing tools for books, e-books, DVDs, music, images and calendars..."

They wrangled in a few big names to judge the Blooker awards including Cory Doctorow of BoingBoing and Wired Mag fame as well as Robin Miller from Slashdot and Paul Jones from iBiblio.

I may attempt to do an interview or two with a couple of the key folks working on the Blooker prize if any of you are interested but I'd like to get your thoughts on that before I do any interviews.