Hey, bloggers! Ever wish you had a permanent copy of your journal, laid out and bound like a regular book? Well, now you’ve got your chance… A new company called Blogbinders which does exactly that. Blogbinders is one of a growing number of new “print on demand” publishers here in the US, basically they hold an electronic version of your book at their offices, then print one copy at a time whenever you need one. It’s a great deal for self-publishers who often don’t need that many copies of our books but sometimes need them at a moment’s notice.
Even better, you don’t even need to collect up your journal entries to put in an order, just tell them the beginning and end dates of what’s to be included in the book, and their automated software will actually go to your site, pull the relevant text, and format it all into a trade-paperback book for you, color cover and perfect-binding and all.
NOTE: So far only blogs at Livejournal.com work with this software, they’re hard at work right now, though, to update the software to accept any journal powered by Blogger or Movable Type.
Much like other print-on-demand companies, once you’ve put in an order the electronic version of your book sits at their company’s hard drive, and they send you a link you can put at your own site, so that anytime one of your readers wants to they can just click on the link and order a copy themselves. They also have their own online store where you can choose to have your book promoted and sold through them.
The per-book price is a little expensive, so I don’t recommend it for people who are going to do full print runs of their journal i.e. more than 100 copies, if you’re just some regular blogger, though, and have always wanted to own a couple of copies of your journal in paper form, for posterity’s sake or to give out to friends and relatives, I highly recommend you check them out. Plus, it never hurts to give your readers a chance to buy your journal in a more permanent form; believe me, you can sometimes be pleasantly surprised by how many of your online readers will actually shell out a few bucks to own something like that.
Comments
6 responses to “BlogBinders”
oh man.
so you gonna do it?
It only works with LiveJournal right now… But if they can get b2 to work then I might consider it
yeah, I might – if i get round to writing decent stuff – and if they get it sorted out for blogger.
Bah, trust me to do it the hard way write a blog that uses no blogger!
I realize it’s been a while, but we did finally roll out support for MT, and TypePad, and even Blogger. And we added a custom markup interchange format, which will be useful to other blog technology developers, and would essentially open our service up for all comers.
-Jen @ BB
So far, it only produces a book of the TEXT of your blog. No images.