The Hindu : International : From blog to book

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Friday, Apr 30, 2004

International

International

From blog to book - at home

By Andrew Losowsky

LEEDS, APRIL 29. It is portable, durable and lets you read your favourite website on the move. Yes, the hottest new online trend is... ordinary paper. Thanks to advances in digital printing and some nifty new web services, anyone with enough words to fill a book can now be published free — and webloggers, in particular, have been quick to take up the offer.

Previously, anyone wanting to get into print would either try the professional route, where authors often have to pay a printing and layout company. In return, they get a box of 200 books, 194 of which usually sit and gather dust.

``Consider what typesetting used to be,'' says Dale Keiger, Visiting Professor in Non-fiction Writing at Johns Hopkins University. ``It was linotype. Typesetters, casting of molten metal for hot type, blocks locked into page forms... Now you can typeset on your home computer.''

Most people now use a word processor and, with the plummeting costs of printing and binding machines, true print-on-demand now exists. If you can design your layout, usually as a PDF or MS Word document, companies such as digital marketplace Lulu.com, own-design merchandise specialist CafePress and, now, British company Publish And Be Damned (Pabd), will let you create a book for absolutely nothing.

They make their money through the base price of the books, which can only be purchased via their online store. The basic cost of a Pabd book under 200 pages with your own cover is £6.99, (about Rs. 560) not including postage. They also insist that you buy 10 copies to begin with. Every time someone wants to buy a copy, the company deals with all printing, payments and delivery. And, crucially, the author as publisher keeps the copyright.

``We want to move away from the vanity publisher towards the idea of the empowered writer,'' says Pabd co-founder Iain Plunkett. ``We personally check each book. We provide you with the services you need — if you can do layout and design, you should not need to pay for it. It's about giving control to the writers.'' Optional, paid-for extras include cover design, editorial critique and ISBN registration.

But not many of us have several thousand words sitting idly on our hard drives. That is, unless you are a blogger, in which case you have been a part of the greatest explosion in penmanship since Samuel Pepys picked up a quill. Although linking to other websites is the heart and soul of some blogs — which cannot easily be reproduced in print — others contain far more considered writing.

``Some bloggers are essayists,'' says Keiger. ``Were they to take their best posts and collect them in a book, they would really be anthologising themselves. The other sort of blog that could work in print is the diary of an experience, as a few filmmakers do.''

There is no reason why a real-life Adrian Mole should not be a hit. HarperCollins released The World According to Mimi Smartypants last month to some critical acclaim — and yet all the content is already online. With no set-up fee, many are trying the book-of-the-blog approach. LJBook, which automatically formats Livejournal entries into a ready-for-print PDF, had more than 500 people take up the offer even before it was announced. Blogbinders creates PDFs for CafePress' print service and Pabd is working on a blog-to-book service of its own. - Guardian Newspapers Limited 2004.

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