Blogs becoming books

Posted by Martin Stabe on 23 August 2006 at 11:50
Tags: Journalism

At Telegraph.co.uk, Ceri Radford and Shane Richmond note the new book by London Ambulance Service medic Tom Reynolds — who contributed a piece about blogging ethics to Press Gazette recently — has just published Blood, Sweat and Tea, a book based on his gritty blog, Random Acts of Reality.

What’s noteworthy about the book is that it retails at £7.99 in dead-tree format but free online under a Creative Commons licence — which makes sense, since all the content orginally appeared free on the blog. The free-online-content debate is probably even more controvertial in book publishing than it is in the newspaper industry, but it’s not the first time that this has been done. To take just one example that may be familiar to Dog’s readers, Dan Gillmor’s citizen journalism tract We the Media is available free online.

More broadly, the “blook” phenomon is not limited to Reynolds’ book — several other books written by authors discovered via their blogs are also on the way.

The police officer who writes under the name David Copperfield will soon see material from his Policeman’s Blog published in book entitled Wasting Police Time, and the teacher who blogs as Frank Chalk will soon be in print in a book called It’s Your Time You’re Wasting.

But it’s not just in front-line public services that this phenomenon is growing. The pseudonymous author of the blog and book The Girl With a One-Track Mind was rather bizarrely — and, frankly, unnecessarily — unmasked by the Sunday Times.

Clearly some publishers are beginning to understand that there is money to be made from discovering content of real quality out there in the long tail of publishing. Isn’t it about time that some newspaper columnists make the same realisation and stop sneering at bloggers?

Tags: Journalism