Websites Becoming Books
Aside from killing off daily newspapers and Google-izing the world’s libraries, the Internet has had at least one mildly positive impact on the publishing industry–the advent of rather amusing books adapted from user-generated websites.
PostSecret is probably the grandaddy of this growing genre. This “ongoing community art project” has so far spawned four fascinating books that display handmade confessions from anonymous contributors.
The pieces cover the full range of human shortcomings, from secret lust to family transgressions and friendly betrayals, and the effect is like sitting in the priest’s chair at a confessional whose waiting area is unusually well-stocked with cut-up magazines and arts & crafts supplies. A fifth PostSecret volume is scheduled for release later this year, featuring Confessions on Life, Death, and God.
A new entry into this genre is Kerry Miller’s Passive Aggressive Notes, which features over a hundred angry, frustrated missives hand-scrawled by pens (or occasionally ketchup bottles) quaking with barely contained fury.
The book is adapted from Miller’s excellent website which displays user-contributed examples of the lengths humans to which humans will go to avoid direct confrontation. Whether you’re a creator in this particular genre yourself or an occasional victim of someone else’s enraged aptitude with pen and Post-It note, Passive Aggressive Notes forces the reader to choose sides in the moral contest between those who eat other’s food out of the fridge and the others who scrawl bitter and grammatically careless notes to quietly punish and shame the offenders.
Perhaps the most controversial of these websites-turned-books is I Can Has Cheezburger, the online cat photo + caption enterprise that has spawned a legion of fans along with an equally ardent army of horrified detractors. The book collects 200 examples of this delightful/diabolical genre, only about 45% of which can legitimately be seen as heralding the end of Western civilization.
If you enjoyed this post, please consider to leave a comment or subscribe to the feed and get future articles delivered to your feed reader.
Comments
See! Books aren’t a dying format. If it’s really good or popular (or both), there’s still an instinctive desire to commit it to print. And don’t forget those tomes originally composed on Japanese cell phones. At least five of them were so popular they made it to the printed page:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/20/world/asia/20japan.html
Bet if the following technology *really* existed, someone would find a way to use it to write a book!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XU9o0nKiOJE
[...] notable website-slash-book project is the ongoing Six Word Memoirs series created by Smith Magazine. While the questionably [...]
[...] recent publishing trend has seen the release of numerous books inspired by websites like PostSecret and Passive Aggressive Notes. I thought I had spotted an even newer [...]
One website I liked that became a book was Things My Girlfriend and I have Argued about. The book is fiction but the website (no longer updated) is all real!
http://www.mil-millington.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/things.html