BlogPrinting for your Blook?

QOOP, Inc, an on-demand printer (like Lulu and a host of others) owns BlogPrinting. Their hype reads:

BlogPrinting addresses the rapidly growing blogosphere, providing bloggers (and their readers) with a convenient, easy-to-use way to publish blog content as printed books. Whether for hardcopy archives, gifts, off-line reading, or plain old publishing, our tools make it quick and easy. Unlike other methods that require software downloads and a lot of manual intervention and editing, our solution converts your blog into a printed book "on the fly."

Not much new there. Like pyxlin and others, this is not a standalone conversion of blog content to an editable file. It has the printing built-in. If you're not ready to print, this is not something for you.

But similar to PrintMyBlog, the big incentive for you to purchase this service is to "start generating revenue from your blog by providing a simple and painless way for your readers to purchase printed copies of your content."

This selling thing is worth examining. With PrintMyBlog they extract the content, compile it, store it and sell it, sending you a royalty. With BlogPrinting you can specify either a percentage or a flat royalty, with royalties being added to the base cost of the book.

What's nifty about BlogPrinting is that users can specify a date range when they make a purchase. [Maybe your blog is like most tv sitcoms, the early years are the best.] OR you, as the owner, can select the date range, maybe do a yearly printing.

Like Blurb, BlogPrinting supports a variety of inputs: Movable Type, WordPress, and TypePad. Note that Blogger is NOT supported because of an issue with how posts are archived. This may have changed - the website gives no indication of currency.

There is no software to download (like there is with Blurb). However, in order to view the output which is PDF you must have a web browser. And speaking of browsers, there's a quirk or a glitch with BlogPrinting that unless your blog's underlying HTML is valid, your output may look hokey.

Our software reads and formats a limited subset of HTML. We'll render most of the simple HTML that people commonly include in their blogs, but there are special cases where our conversion engine cannot render the HTML the same way that your browser does. In particular, HTML errors, such as missing tags that the browser may let you get away with, may cause your blog to print incorrectly. Therefore, your particular results may vary. We strongly recommend that you inspect the preview before purchase! If the preview appears different than what is displayed in the browser, you may want to check the HTML code in your blog to ensure that it is valid HTML. Online HTML validators are available that can verify your code and help identify potential errors (search for "online HTML validator").

Is there something I can edit?

When asked on the FAQ page, "Do I need to remake the book when I add new posts to my blog?" the response was, ""You don't have to go through any formatting steps to make new books. Our server makes each book on the fly." Which means you lose whatever tweaking you do to the HTML of the previous content, right? [Unless you're not tweaking output -- which means you fiddle with the original HTML?]

Which brings me to editing. There is no way to search the website and aside from the About the Company page the only substance is on the FAQ page. So, reading between the lines, one of the questions asked is, "I am using the PDF Maker utility in Word; how do I make adjustments for all the different settings?" Based on this my guess would be that the output is a PDF file. I would anticipate that in any case since that's what the other services provide. But this ain't necessarily so. The question comes after a discussion on creating covers which must be in PDF format. So what's the answer? Is there an output file of the text of my blog that I can edit?

There is the same ambiguity (read no information) with the Quick Print option which appears on the home page. You push the button "to order a copy of your blog without creating an account." I chose WordPress, Quick Print. It took me to a page where I was supposed to fill in my username and password for my blog and the blog's URL. I was tempted just to see what would happen. But then again, this is NOT a free service; somewhere along the line I would have to pay for my experiment.

So I did the next best thing -- I found someone who had experimented and was happy with the result. Lori Grant over at Smart Lemming posted in February:

I tested out BlogPrinting.com and loved it. I had a minor problem, but the customer service guy assigned to me as amazing. He even called me on my cell phone as we tried to work through a little thing that I was doing. We figured it out. Before I knew it, I had my blog books delivered to me. All you do is:

• Choose the date range that you want printed.


• BlogPrint’s technology logins as you, then pulls all the posts for the date range.


• As it pulls the content, it generates a PDF file.


• You can choose to upload a book cover or it will create one for you.


• You approve, enter your payment info, and shipping requirements, and you’re done!

I know, I know. We still don't know whether the PDF of text can be edited. I tried.

The only words of caution that I found come from a review at All Things Web 2.0:

When dealing with content, be especially aware of the terms and conditions of use on sites you consider using. This site has several important documents included in its Terms and Conditions, including its terms related to marketing and selling your content, that those who plan significant sales may want to show to an attorney. For most casual bloggers and photo sharing site users Blogprinting is a cool way to create a real book of all or part of their content for a reasonable price.

I find the words "this site" confusing - where are the Terms and Conditions that I'm supposed to be looking at? ATW 2.0?

The other caution has to do with Qoop, the parent company, not BlogPrinting in particular. It comes from Crooked Timber and was posted in November 2005:

I know that Qoop has a Blog Printing service in beta, but it doesn’t seem to be open to just anyone (plus it is not clear whether they are supporting all blogging software at this point). In any case, given my experiences with Qoop’s Flickr photobook printing, I would rather explore some alternatives first. (The result was okay. The cover was very nice, but the rest seemed more like a notebook than a book per se. For that, the price seemed a bit too high.)