Self Publish Blooks

Reuters has a fairly interesting story about blogs turning into books. Apparently some bloggers get paid advances in amounts that usually only applies to traditional bestsellers, and that makes people scared about a burnout in this sub-niche. A fresh wave of blog-based books from waiter, emergency medical worker, taxi driver, quilters, wine connoisseur, and handful of titles with political themes are now in bookshelf.
“It’s like the dot-com boom all over again," some publishers say the craze could fizzle out.

Blurb.com, a self-publishing startup, now invite 600 bloggers this week to try out its new service by creating a free bound copy of their blog. Those who participate will get a taste of how to convert their blog into books. In this service, Blurb offer extensive customization options, an e-commerce storefront, and forthcoming tagging and metadata add-ons.

The blog-to-book feature isn't cheap. An 8-by-10 full-color, hardcover book with custom dust jacket costs between $30 and $80.

Any one read enough blogs will know one or two of those bad-girl diarists. Bad-girl diarists are using the web to reveal their sex lives to the online world. They write about sex, work, men, Valentine's Day, cooking, sex, men. Those writings, or sexblogs, often have therapeutical effect for both authors and some reader, and people will always have an interest in sexblogs because sex is something that affects all our lives. The biggest Bad-girl blook story in UK right now is authored by The Girl With a One-Track Mind.

Blogging is often called push-button publishing, it looks like within next few short years, we could see 'Push-button printing' become a hot trend. In a recent announcement that the print-on-demand Espresso machine is now being tested at the World Bank, which can print black-and-white text for a 300-page paperback with a four-color cover, and bind it together in 3 minutes.

If the test run goes well, as early as next year people would be able to order books (or blogs) online in just about any language. After pressing few buttons, faster than they can say "Grande Caramel Macchiato," peoplee will be able to be pick up the finished book/blook at a nearby bookstore, coffee shop, Kinko’s or Wal-Mart.

Below is their self-publishing experience -
BlogBinders.com internally uses CafePress.com, and you can see it at times. For example, you need to create two accounts, and you will get emails from both services. Also, the package arrives in CafePress.com wrapping. This makes it look as if BlogBinder is riding on the back of someone else’s service.
However, BlogBinders understands different blogging packages – LiveJournal, Blogger.com, TypePad, Movable Type, WordPress and others – and spares you the hassle of figuring out how to convert this into a book. CafePress only accept PDF files at that time. So instead of turning blog into a PDF yourself, you just simply tell BlogBinders which blogging software you use. In our case, I had been using TypePad, and my daughter was using Blogger from Google.
You will now be able to edit the book online and reformat some passages or delete blocks of text. You can then continue to choose font and cover styling. There aren’t many options at the moment, so we went for a rather traditional font. I insisted to go for the highest-quality printing – the price is still fair enough to pay. After you configured the settings, you can render a preview PDF which will be displayed right in the browser. All of these steps worked flawlessly for us.
And then, you send the book to print. After BlogBinders checks your configuration and approves your book, it will be shipped to you.
The table of contents works nicely and is separated into the different years and months for easy access now that actual Google-like search functionality will be lost. Our book has little over 150 pages, and covers a selected few articles from around one year of blogging between me and my daughter.
Not all things which work online work offline, naturally. My daughter was careful to select only bigger articles, and those with a simpler style. Tables, illustrations, any kind of advanced formatting, will be lost when BlogBinders converts your blog. Links will also be lost, of course, but you can keep the link text – it pays off if in the past you avoided “click here” non-semantics. Before we would ever consider selling it, we would need to edit it, too, which would consist of both proof-reading and making sure web-specifics translated well.

Overall, the experience is more labor intensive than we originally thought, but well worth it !

Here's a create use of self-publishing: Cameron Kelly of North Carolina (US)proposed to his girlfriend Angie Kreimer via a 113-page self-published book he self-published at Lulu.com -- 50 Reasons Why You Should Marry Me and 51 Reasons Why I Should Marry You. The book includes 101 pages of text and 44 color photographs. "It's a sort of prose-poem, with pictures," Kelly said. According to a Lulu.com press release, some of the reasons he claimed he was marriage-worthy included:
- I clean the bathroom every week.

- I'm going to look like Sean Connery when I'm 65.

- You don't even have to change your initials!
Apparently the book was met with a one-word reply -- "yes".

Please drop me a line if you know someone using a blog to propose a marriage, I am sure there are quite few.