Blurb

Over on BenjaminCrowder.com I just posted some pictures from my new Blurb book. (This one’s a birthday present for my dad, but I plan to make a “public” one soon as well.)

DId you compile the book yourself? And is this just a photo book, not a blog book? They don’t yet support wordpress blogs (save the ones that are hosted on wordpress.com) but I’m told they’ll have support this year…

Yes, this is a photo book compiled by me from my Flickr photos. You just download their BookSmart software (runs on both Mac and Windows), slurp in your photos, and drag them into place. It’s very easy. (I do wish they had more flexibility with the layouts, but they’re aiming at the Grandma market.)

I did notice that they don’t yet support non-WP.com WordPress blogs. I think I’d rather do my blog book (From the Top of the Mountains) through Lulu, though — a blog book seems to me to be more text-centric (at least in the case of this one), and Lulu’s better at that. It would also be much cheaper — 300 pages with Lulu would be $10, far cheaper than the $60 with Blurb. (Granted, this is an apples-and-oranges comparison.)

Summary: I’ll be doing photo books with Blurb and text books with Lulu.

As far as I’ve seen thus far, Lulu offers no automation for converting a blog into a book. You have to copy/paste and format all the text into a document yourself, correct?

True. For those who don’t know how (or want) to pull the text in themselves, Blurb would probably be better. For me, though, it’s easy enough to pull the text from MySQL (along with comments) and tag it appropriately so I can use regular expressions to assign styles in Word (InDesign doesn’t do regular expressions yet) and import it into InDesign ready to go. Besides, the graphic designer in me strongly prefers having control over layout. :)

[…] And so, when I was reminded about my blook desire after reading Ben’s post, I decided to put off the ~10 other things I was supposed to do today (except for attending the temple, of course) and write my own script to do just this. […]