The best blog-to-books

In this season of literary awards, some of the same authors and books seem to pop up all over the place. Not so with the second annual Lulu Blooker Prizes, devoted to "blooks" -- books based on blogs or Web sites. The awards are sponsored by Lulu, which makes print-on-demand books.

The overall winner (of a $10,000 prize) and nonfiction winner is: "My War: Killing Time in Iraq" by Colby Buzzell (Berkley, $15), which started as a blog that Buzzell, a machine gunner in Iraq, began to "kill time." The popular blog led US Army brass to close down soldiers' blogs.

The fiction winner is "The Doorbells of Florence" (worth a click to see a selection) by Andrew Losowsky (Prandial Publishing/Lulu, $29.85), a British blogger's self-published collection of photographs of Florentine doorbells. Each is accompanied by "a strange story about the people and things that may or may not live inside."

The comics winner is "Mom's Cancer" by Brian Fies (Abrams Image, $12.95), a graphic novel about Fies's mother's battle with metastatic lung cancer. It began life as serialized web comic.