A bloggy book

If you are my Facebook friend, you may recall that I was looking for a way to print/publish my blog so that the kids would always have access to it, long after Blogspot is a thing of the past. My original plan was to print each entry on our home printer and then, when the stack of paper got "big" I would trot down to Kinkos and have it bound with some velo binding or spiral binding or some such thing. But, then one day I decided to do a google search on "print your blog" or something similar.

That led me to a site called Blog2Print (I think). I thought I had struck paydirt because I was going to be able to print my first 6 months of blog posts for $35. The site was not terribly user friendly, though. For example, when it pulled the text and photos from my blog, it put the photos all at the beginning (or end - I can't remember) with no regard for the fact that the photo captions are embedded in the text and now made no sense whatsoever. Which would have been fine if I could have fixed it. But it could not be edited. At all.

So, I did what all fine researchers do...I changed my FB status to read that I was looking for tips for printing my blog and several people told me about Blurb.com. I checked it out and found it to be much more user friendly. It allowed me to drag and drop the text of each entry to a page format of my choosing and then drag each photo over and match it up to its caption. To the extent I couldn't get the photo to line up with its caption, well, I just moved its caption.

I was sure that for all this convenience I would surely have to pay through the nose. But, wonder of all wonders...this site was actually cheaper. They offer hard and soft cover books. I chose soft cover because I already print hard cover photo books for every six months of our lives and I didn't really think my bloggy thoughts were hard cover worthy, if you know what I mean. In the end, my first book (71 entries in 48 pages) was $24.99 and the second (with fewer entries and fewer pages) was only $19.99.

I am thrilled with the way they turned out. What do you think?

The photo quality is good. The paper quality is good. If I could change anything, it would be the soft cover itself. It already seems a little bent out of shape, but for these prices, who can complain? In conclusion, I would highly recommend the Blurb for any of you who are interested in preserving those blog memories for posterity. I fully understand that there will be a few years (you know, the adolescent years) when I will have to hide these treasures from the children, lest they be destroyed. But in the long run, I hope that they will find these books to be a lot of fun to read and very informative about their, well, formative years.