What’s this site all about, anyway?

Moby Blook is an experiment in e-text design, inspired by a series of discussions on Word Munger about the future sustained narrative. The idea, inspired by one of the commenters, Anne Fernald, was to use the blog form to present a text.

I wasn’t the first to think of this idea: as commenters pointed out, it’s been done to great acclaim with the Samuel Pepys Diary and Dracula. However, these texts are both in journal form, and the blog-ification of them simply places them in reverse-chronological order. This works well if you’re following the text in real-time, but not so well if you want to read the text later on, in the proper order.

In reversing the traditional order of the blog, I think I’ve created something that’s not a blog at all, but rather simply a way of presenting text in a predetermined order. It’s not quite a blog, and not quite a book, so I’ve given it a new name: the “blook.” A blook has all the navigational features that make blogs easy to use, but it’s presented as a completed product, not a work in (constant) progress.

That said, since this blook is an experiment, I will be making changes to it as I go along. I’ve tried to set things up as clearly and usefully as possible from the beginning, but I also understand that I can make mistakes, and so if I make them, I’m going to fix them.

And I do hope that people will eventually see this first blook as more than just an experiment in text design; I encourage readers to comment on the text itself as well. In fact, that’s what I’ll be doing as I go through the process of presenting the text. I will be a reader, just like anyone else, and the first impressions I note will be my literary impressions. It’s only in hindsight that I will make emendations to the book design, based on how well it works as a device for presenting serious literature.

It’s my hope, if this project succeeds, that others will imitate or outright copy this blook. For example, if you’re a teacher and want to create a blank, uncommented blook for your class to use, please contact me and I’ll help you install it on your own server. If you’re a writer and would like to make your own works available in this form, I can give you the template files so you’ve got an easy starting point. If you’re a publisher who’d like to distribute texts this way, let me know how I can help.

Most of all, however, this is a project for readers. So why not go to Page 1 and start reading?