It's a tad discouraging (read off-putting) when you get to a site, click on the Our Story page and lo, and behold! a different company name is referenced right there smack in the middle of the page! That's what happened at PrintMyBlog. A person - singular - writes "I developed this idea for my own blog ..." It's not until you click on the link that you find out that the fellow who wrote the program is, in fact, a fellow, and that his name is Dan Sherman.
He says that the idea occured to him to print out his blog and sell print copies. He called it a "blog booklet service" and lists the company name as BlogBooklet.com. [So we're either at BlogBooklet or PrintMyBlog. One of the two].
The hype says that they (the company, whichever one it is) (or he) will
- extract and compile your blog into booklet form;
- process an order from your reader, take his money and ship the product; and
- you get a royalty.
By the way, the longer I stay at the website, the testier I'm getting about being unable to highlight material to pull into this post for quoting. Why is every page -- not text -- but an image with text? Be that as it may, I will slog on.
Links as we have seen are a big deal in blogs as well as the blooks printed from them. PrintMyBlog places a number in parens next to where each link was when it's printed out. The reader [holding a paper copy in their hands] must then enter a URL in a browser on a computer and enter the number of the link that they want to look at. Say what? Yep. AND ... the link takes them to the extracted-compiled booklet version of the blog -- NOT the blog itself. [This idea SO doesn't work for me. ]
One nice thing - if you have ads on your site, they'll be stripped so that only your content survives. One (more) bad thing -- they pre-print older parts of the blog for shipping. These older parts are packaged with the balance up to the current date. Which means anyone who ordered the first three months and wants just the next three will instead get all six. [Sort of like a serialized novel except you keep getting the beginning each time?]
In my opinion, the concept might be okay. I don't want to rush to judgment on that. Booklets, okay. Minimal cost to reader, okay. But the compounding of content, I'm not so okay with that. Better to select a date-range and order what you want. And for pity's sake, let's figure out what to do with the links sans combined with computer.
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