After sleeping on it, I'm more convinced than ever that PrintMyBlog has a good idea. Producing a print booklet of articles from your blog for a fixed period of time, say one month's worth, would be like producing an issue of a magazine. The problem with PrintMyBlog is, as I understand it, the cumulative production. Say that we setup a magazine-style order with them. If our customer orders Issue #1, that's what he would get. If he ordered Issue #2 (which is NOT an option), he would get nos. 1 and 2 bundled together.
But think about it. If your blog lends itself to print "issues" - periodic installments -- the concept could work for you. Instead of readers printing out web pages here and there with redundant headers and advertising, and sometimes virtually blank pages, they could subscribe to your mag. Only the actual content would go into the booklet and they could read it on the train or in a lounge chair as PrintMyBlog's website sugggests. [To my mind the best part about print is being able to mark it up - highlight it, make notes in the margins, etc.]
Installments or serialization sounds a bit like some of the blooks that I've already looked at. For instance, Success in the Arts first appeared as individual essays on a blog. Then they were collected into a print volume. Many early novels were produced in serial form in magazines. Contemporary author Lew Weinstein has made his book, A Good Conviction, available for the asking, in installments.
I'd like to look briefly at A List Apart. Like PrintMyBlog they have a software component to them (Prince) [I'm unsure what the exact association is. Maybe they'll stop by and tell me]. But as an online magazine, they DO have issues/installments. Which puts them right in the middle of this discussion.
A List Apart began as a web design mailing list. Within months they had 16,000 subscribers. Since the founders were CSS gurus and had worked with the W3C, one would expect the site to be constructed making extensive use of stylesheets. It is. And it is exactly this underlying structure which has now made it possible for them to produce a book from the HTML and CSS! If you can handle the technical language, read "Printing a Book with CSS: Boom!" by Bert Bos, Håkon Wium Lie for the details.
The actual conversion is done with Prince:
The Prince formatter has opened up the processing pipeline from HTML and CSS to PDF. It is now possible, even feasible, to use HTML as the document format for books. This makes it easier to cross-publish content on the web and in print.The Prince formatter is developed, supported and marketed by YesLogic Pty Ltd. YesLogic is headquartered in Melbourne, Australia.
I suspect that Prince would work with blogs (or I've posted this for nothing) since most blogs are primarily HTML and CSS. But the Testimonials page is worth reading for anyone with content to convert. Consider just this one quote, "We use it to generate entire textbooks of home schooling material. We were able to produce a beautiful textbook-style layout with margins and sidenotes and more."
So, now we have something new to think about when it comes to blooks.
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