The Lulu Blooker Prize Celebrates New Forms of Content

The winners of the 2006 Lulu Blooker Prize for Blooks were announced yesterday, and Julie Powell, Zach Miller, and Cherie Priest were judged to be the best in each of their respective categories. Celebrating the best in blooks (books with content that was developed in a significant way from material originally presented on a website), the Blooker Prize is an extremely important exercise in recognizing a rapidly growing literary form that is still flying under the radar of mainstream cultural consumption.

Julie Powell’s Julie & Julia, the tales of a a 30-year-old secretary living in a bohemian apartment in Queens who spent 365 days cooking all 524 recipes from Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking was taken from her Salon blog which chronicled tales from her kitchen in a humorous and compelling way. Cherie Priest’s Four and Twenty Blackbirds is a Gothic novel that was created through her serialized writing on her LiveJournal. Zach Miller, a minor celebrity because of his popular webcomic Joe and Monkey, capitalized on his web success by releasing Totally Boned, a collection of stories and drawings about Joe and his extremely-cool monkey.

I must commend Lulu for creating the Blooker Prize, and for bringing recognition to a rapidly growing form of content-generation for literature: the world wide web. As a personal publisher, Lulu has made it possible for the general public to create and distribute books, leading to rise in new names and new trends in the sphere of publishing. Blogs and webcomics, the most prevalent forms of syndicated serialized content on the internet, have been largely ignored in the literary circles because of their lack of print permanency. Luckily, blooks have been increasing the exposure of web content, and are bringing about a change in an often-stagnant literary culture.

Charles Dickens’ greatest works originally appeared as serialized works in newspapers, and blooks are no different; only the medium of serialization has changed in today’s digital world. As I alluded to in my earlier post on the Man Booker Prize, literary awards are extremely vital to fostering a culture of reading within our contemporary culture based on instant gratification. The Lulu Blooker Prize is even more pivotal, as it casts aside the notion that books are static works, and embraces dynamic content. Congratulations and thanks to Lulu, Julie, Zach, and Cherie, as well as all the other short-listed writers: you’re helping those of us creating content on the web gain the exposure that we have been sorely lacking.