I received my copy of Tony Pierce’s new “Blook” in the mail yesterday. This is the second book that I have bought from a blogger trying to move their new media work into old media.
The first was Kitty Bukkake‘s “Kitty Meets the Furries”. Kitty took one incident from her blog and turned it into a short, clever, attractively illustrated book.
Tony, though, takes his blog, pretty much as-is (minus the photos) and makes it available on paper.
There are some posts missing, but I’m assuming much of that has to do with photo copyright issues and tight editing.
I don’t have my copy with me, so everything I type is from my very poor memory, but I believe the first entry in the blook is from August of 2001. This is a good six months or so before I had run into Tony’s site, so it is interesting to see how he has evolved as a writer over the last year and a half. I don’t mean as in “improved”, because he was a great writer back then, too. It’s just interesting to see how characters emerge and he develops his writing “voice”.
Tony even gives credit to the person who coined the term “blook”, which is funny to me, as it shows how most people online recognize the importance of attribution and links to the whole blogging system. If writers in old media had been so thoughtful, it would be much easier to determine how our language has developed and why.
It surprises me that more blog authors haven’t taken the huge volume of material on their sites and produced a book of their own. Don’t most bloggers yearn to be a published author? “Blook” isn’t a vanity printing, though. Tony’s paper blog is a good read (which I have nowhere near finished), showing that, ultimately, quality writing holds up in any form. I recommend it to anyone that enjoys his current work.
Okay, that’s enough talk about TP for this year. People are gonna start to think we got something going on.