"It's got 500 friends on Facebook and 150 hits per day on the blog before I've even launched anything," says Bruno Ceschel. "It's tapping into a real community. I had a sense of a critical mass but had no idea it would be so popular."

It is a series of events Ceschel is organising called Self Publish, Be Happy, and they are a wholesale celebration of DIY photobooks. The first event in the series is an exhibition of photobooks at The Photographers' Gallery on 05 and 06 June, which will showcase between 30 and 40 books curated by Ceschel, a former book editor at the Chris Boot publishing house. He's included publications by Stephen Gill, Jason Evans and Joachim Schmid alongside much less familiar photographers, and mixed up with professionally printed and inkily photocopied work.

"Some of the books have been put together with ondemand publishers online, others have been printed in the Far East," he says. "Still others have a newsprint feel, more akin to traditional underground zines. In each case I've chosen them because the format fits the photography - I wasn't interested in dummies put together to attract conventional book publishers. I wanted to celebrate them as they were, and in fact only a few would translate well into classical photobooks.

Self Publish, Be Happy also celebrates traditional printed books, rather than online publications or applications aimed at iPads. To Ceschel, the experience of reading a book online is very diff erent to looking at a printed object, and that's a view shared by some other key influencers. Martin Parr and Gerry Badger are researching the subject, and Marc Purst, formerly of Agence Vu, is collecting DIY books for a festival in Rome.

Later in the year, 10 selected photographers will make their own photobook at a workshop at Photofusion, and a selfpublished book fair will take place during Photomonth. "The idea is to open up DIY photobooks to a wider audience," says Ceschel. "I'm trying to include books that cost £20 or less in the exhibition. I'm not interested in books that are very expensive or only for people who are in the know."

Self Publish, Be Happy, an exhibition curated by Bruno Ceschel, is on show at The Photographers' Gallery from 05-06 June. Ceschel is also organising a workshop on self publishing later in the year and a self-published book expo at Spitalfields Traders' Market in October.