THE musings of an Iraqi who charted Baghdad’s reaction to the war in Iraq and a person claiming to be a London-based prostitute are to be recognised for the first time by a literary award for internet books.

The Blooker Prize, worth a total of $4,000 (£2,300), will be awarded to books originating from the best fiction and non-fiction websites.

The title of the prize comes from a play on the Man Booker Prize for fiction and “blooks”, an amalgamation of “book” and “blog”, an abbreviation for web logs.

Contenders for the $2,000 top prize include Salam Pax: The Clandestine Diary of an Ordinary Iraqi, which drew millions of readers in the run-up to the American and British invasion of Iraq as he observed the effect of impending conflict on Baghdad’s civilians. The writer, who has acted as an interpreter for war corresponents, subsequently published his web journal as a book.

Belle de Jour: The Intimate Adventures of a London Call Girl, by Anon, claimed to represent diary entries from a prostitute, but attracted speculation that it was written by a freelance journalist and aspiring writer. She, or he, subsequently received a publishing deal with Weidenfeld & Nicolson and a film contract with Channel 4.

Any book written in English that began life online is eligible for the prize, but judges will be concentrating on a longlist of 109 titles, including The Darwin Awards: Evolution in Action, a site dedicated to acts of stupidity that generally result in the person’s removal from the gene pool, and Jump the Shark, which pinpoints the moment writers of popular television series run out of ideas. It is named after the episode of Happy Days in which The Fonz jumps over a shark while waterskiing.

Entries do not have to be released by mainstream publishers, but can be self-published or released by print-on-demand companies.

The judges will be led by Cory Doctorow, the London-based internet commentator and co-editor of the weblog BoingBoing. He will be joined by Robin Miller, editor-in-chief of the popular technology site Slashdot, and Paul Miller, director of iBiblio, a digital library.

The competition, sponsored by the print-on-demand publisher Lulu, is the first to recognise that writers are honing their literary talents online. Salam Pax and Belle de Jour have both had their blooks published as they appeared online, but publishers are increasingly commissioning writers to compose books unrelated to their blooks. Ana Marie Cox, the political blogger known as Wonkette, has published a novel about a heated election.

Other authors, such as the fantasy writers John Scalzi and Cherie Priest, serialised their books on their weblogs.

Mr Doctorow said that writers of books and scripts were in a new era in which they could interact with their audience closer than ever before. “We are in a new media age in which how successful you are can be influenced by how much you interact with your audience,” he said.

He added that some publishers were on the verge of allowing readers who pre-ordered books to watch the author’s working notes as he or she completed the work.

Books that started online are no less important than books that started in other media, he said. “The Bible is as much a book today as it was when it was a scroll,” he said. “Dickens originally intended his work to appear in newsprint, not as a book.”

www.timesonline.co.uk/books
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