I chose today's blook based 1) on my membership in the Illinois Philological Association; 2) my association with linguist, Craig Sirles at DePaul University; and 3) somebody has asked about converting blogged essays into a blook.
The hype for Far from the Madding Gerund by the publisher William, James & Company, includes a description of the blog the blook came from: "Language Log is a site where serious professional linguists go to have fun." It also says:
Mark Liberman and Geoffrey K. Pullum have collected some of their most insightful and amusing material from Language Log, the popular web site they founded. Often irreverent and hilarious, these brief essays take on many sacred cows, showing us—among many things—why Strunk & White is useless, how the College Board can’t identify sentence errors in the SAT, and what makes Dan Brown one of the worst prose stylists in the business.
Post about blook's debut
I'm fascinated by the how-an-agent-found-me stories so cannot resist including this one. On April 17, 2006, Geoffrey Pullum posted:
At this weekend's Wordstock Festival, a big book fair in Portland, Oregon, the cat will be up, the jig will be out of the bag: Language Log is making its first venture into print.
You see, some time last year an interesting offer arrived at Language Log Plaza. Tom Sumner, managing editor at the great publishing house of William, James & Co. in Wilsonville, Oregon (increasingly the epicenter of the world publishing industry now that Manhattan is so over), informed Mark and me that he wanted to put together a print collection of some of our Language Log posts from 2003 to 2005. And, modest and shy though we are (what, our little contributions?), Mark and I ultimately succumbed to his blandishments.
Naturally, Mark and I see ourselves as being basically of the post-print era. Cyber-aware, web-initiated, silicon-sinewed, HTML-savvy guys. Books, for us, are those old, musty things bound in calf skin that line the walls of the studies of older scholars. Books are for geezers. We do most of our research through web browsers, like everybody else now. We belong to the 21st century, not the 14th. We are much too modern for books.
More than just editing
Many self-published folks have to rely on themselves or knowledgable friends for editing. But, hey! these guys are professors -- no sweat! That may be so but things were taken out of their grubby academic hands. Geoffrey K. Pullum went on to write:
Tom [Sumner] turns out to be a great editor. He not only ferreted out all the little tiny slip-ups (we make a few) and fixed them, and tracked down all the cross-references and verified them; he made many key decisions about the book. He made selection recommendations; he did the sequencing and the breaking into thematic chapters; he did a beautiful page design (sidenotes rather than footnotes); he even researched the cover color with marketing people.
[Note: these are all things that YOU get to do, if you decide to blook yourself :-) ]
BlogCritics liked the sidenotes:
A point needs to be made about the whole "blog as book" idea. One of the things that has always worried me about blogs turning into books is how the use of hyperlinks would be handled. Footnotes are one obvious solution, but constantly looking down at the bottom of the page to check what the footnote is about can get tedious, especially when there are a lot of notes. Liberman and Pullum avoid this by using light gray lettering (rather than black) for links, and placing the corresponding URLs in the outside margin of the page, next to the referral. This makes checking the link content a lot easier, and if it's not a standard procedure for blogs-turned-books, it should be.
But not everyone was happy with the decision to use sidenotes. Robert Lane Greene writes for Slate in "Revenge of the Language Nerds": "The blog-as-book format is difficult at times — links are presented as sidebars, which works better in some cases than others. But the book is readable throughout."
Remember that Warren Meyer left the underlining for the links - but no footnotes or sidenotes?
Thoughts on why to buy the blook
Language Hat had some good thoughts on buying [which are really reasons to consider making your blog into a blook]:
Now, you might think: "Why should I pay for a book the entirety of whose contents is available online gratis?" But except to those frighteningly nouveau-siècle types who think books are a relic of the past, like clay tablets and slide rules, the experience of reading is much enhanced by being able to see the words in nice crisp type on a page that can be carried around, read while walking down the street, and (if inspiration strikes and one is not part of the books-are-sacred-objects crowd) annotated by hand. And this is a beautifully produced book (my hat is off to the publisher, William, James & Company): handsome, nicely laid out (with URLs and annotations in smaller-type sidebars), well indexed; hell, it even smells good. And it's actually been proofread, which seems to be viewed as an unnecessary expense by most publishers these days.
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