Tuesday 7 February 2012

Tech Tuesday - Blog to Book

I read an interesting post on the JLog blog last week and that got me thinking about this blog and the fact that over the last few weeks I have been focusing on my Family History Writing Challenge posts and my plans for them.

I went off to explore the site BookFabrik. This site specialises in turning your blog quite literally into a book, either a real copy with paper or a PDF version. You can request a proof in PDF and see what it looks like. This blog came out at over 1500 pages, but it is 10 years old! That is all published posts and those that I have written and scheduled to post. The proof was interesting, and some adjustments would need to be made. Further exploring of the site and there are options to restrict some posts and tweak what you want to appear in your book. There is no blanket upload of your material, it can be as specific or general as the author wants, using the tags from your blog.  There also the ability to change the writing layout of the book cover, in both terms of photographic design and author. I also set the parameters to use every blog post on a separate page. There is the option of printing in order of posting - newest or oldest first, the date span.

This is certainly food for thought. I have yet to explore if there are other companies or facilities that are offering the same, I suspect that there are. At the point where you can download your PDF proof, there is also the option to purchase the actual book in both PDF and paper version. The costs are displayed in Euros - but for this blog the costs were around 80 Euros for the paper version and 5 Euros for the PDF. Which actually seems reasonable to me, given the work load that would be involved otherwise.

Further consideration is that if I decide to use this company, I shall go back through all my posts and ensure that the correct tags are added to the posts. I will then print the book to include all those with that tag. I am sure that those without tags are not included, but I would need to investigate further.

Cropped picture showing the book details and a link to this blog

I picture above is a photograph of the screen showing the first page - with the details of the book and a link back to this blog. The details on the right are the description for this blog which you can see above.

3 comments:

  1. Interesting. 'Blog to book' is something that I have been considering.

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  2. Thanks for a good tip Julie. I'm part way through editing some of my blog posts with Booksmart. I decided to do the general posts in one book and the 52 weeks series in another. My overall plan is that it goes to my children....assuming they're interested now or in the future. Your suggestion is another option to explore.

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  3. Forgot to add that I've learned I'd be better off to insert my photos at high rather than medium as when they go to print they're too poor. The photos themselves are more than adequate to print at a good standard.

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