THE RAPID growth of internet blogsbeingconvertedinto books has prompted traditional publishers to scour the internet inthehopeofuncoveringthenext best-selling author.

More and more bloggers are taking advantage of their online popularity and turning their blogs into printed books - dubbed "blooks". While the majority used to turn to self-publishing sitestomakethejump,traditional publishersincludingCanongate,Penguinand Harper Collins are moving quickly to get in on the act.

There are currently more than 70 million blogs on the web - with a further 175,000 created every day.

Successful blogs to blooks include The Devil Wears Prada and Julie And Julia: My Year Of Cooking Dangerously. Julie Powell's cooking creation was awarded the inaugural Blooker Prize last year and is now being made into a film, referred to - you guessed it - as a "flook".

Peter Freedman, who created the Blooker Prize while working for the world's largest self-publishing website Lulu, said: "For publishers, blogging has become a form of market testing. It's like the X Factor for authors: the best way to get known is to start a blog. In some ways blooks are going back to the future. They are migrating back from the cutting edge to print and with it reviving writing in serial form."

This year, 18 out of the 110 entries for the Blooker Prize came from the UK, while two made it into the final 15 shortlisted. Such acclaim has set agents' and publishers' noses twitching.

Canongate senior editor of fiction, FrancisBickmore,hasbeenvisited more and more by agents with proposals for books taken directly from blogs. Bickmore said: "The frontline of agents are actively harvesting and using the fact someone has a popular blog as a selling point to publishers. When they say they've never been published before in print but they've got 100,000 readers then that is pretty persuasive. We are also actively scouting for stuff on blogs ourselvesandtryingtofindnew material online."

Bickmore points to the shrewdness of writers like Steven Hall, who used his MySpace web-page to whip up support for The Raw Shark Texts before they were ever published. Bickmore does, however, warn not every blog is worthy of being published.

He added: "By 2010 there will be 500 millionblogsandthequantityof unmediated data will make it useless. We need online mediators and sites you can really trust."

Bob Young, founder of Lulu.com, which sells around 180,000 books a month, claims that publishers should embrace the changing nature of publishing.

He said: "Christie's and Sotheby's are doing every bit as well as they were before eBay came along. We are not competing with the existing publishing industry; we are enabling all the bloggers and new generation of writers to turn their works into books to deliver to their readers and adding a vast number of new titles to the library shelves."