Books Electric

In its consistent excellence, the Onion A.V. Club has a post about websites that have become books.

I’ve never bought a book that was first published entirely online, but I can understand why other people would. A whole shelf of my bookcase is populated only with collections of work that was serialized. About half of those books are comics (Black Hole, Watchmen, Bone) and the rest are essays and novels. Of all those books, about a quarter of them were serialized in my lifetime. I don’t own any of the originals because I don’t want to carry around 22 issues of a magazine just for 5,000 words. I could just as easily read those book-inspiring websites on my laptop, but like with watching video, I’d rather not spend hours with a computer if I’m not interacting with it.

All of the classics that were originally published in multiple parts takes away the argument against some of these blog books’ (or bloogks’) literary or entertainment value. And while bloogks (I need a better word) are most likely a crass attempt to make money off of something that’s free, the comfort and convenience of a paperback could be worth a few dollars.

Maybe I’m being too cynical. Maybe publishers have wised up and are using the web to find new talent, and are editing the democracy of the internet for consumers. And maybe people want to read something interesting in a medium without e-mail, twitter or iTunes attached to it. Publishers are probably trying to cash in on the web, but it’s just an update of publishers cashing in on something else people liked. What was the 19th-Century equivalent of Lolcats? Judging by how unpleasant they are, I’ll say it was James Fenimore Cooper