I have finished creating hardbound books made from the first 3 years of this blog. In the end, the favored solution was to paste the blog into Microsoft Word (after reversing the order and expanding the comments), clean up the formatting a bit, and send it to Lulu as a PDF for printing.
That sounds pretty straightforward…and it is, really, once you have all of the margins and things figured out. But still, it was a lot of work…there are now 892 posts published on the blog (not including this one). Even with the cutoff at the end of 2010, the posts added up to very nearly one thousand printed pages of text and photos. It takes a long time to just scroll through a thousand pages, much less read or edit (or write) it. So, it was a lot of work…but worth it, I think. The final products are beautiful…here are the covers:
Blog book covers
And her are the spines, with my hand deliberately still in the photo for some scale:
Blog book spines
It’s quite the stack of pages. The printing is gorgeous, and I highly recommend Lulu to anyone who is considering something like this. It is an interesting bit of trivia that I did the 2009 book first (“Adria’s First Year”), because at the time that was the most discrete and interesting chunk of time. When I did that book, I was still using b2evolution as my blog engine. Then I did 2008 (“The First Nine Months”) and 2010 (“And Then There Were Four”) as exports from WordPress. So if you flip through them chronologically, you get an oddly alternating format. They all look good…just, different.
