People occasionally ask me if I've ever thought of making a book of these blog posts, to which the answer is "yes". In fact, I had always intended to produce an Idiotic Hat Annual, a bit like the ones we used to get for Christmas when I was a boy, compiling the best bits of the preceding year into a single handy volume. However, the cost and effort involved turned out to be prohibitive. Blurb used to offer a "blog slurping" service, which enabled the text and images of a blog to be hoovered up selectively by date range, or even by ticking individual posts, and then compiled them into a presentable book. However, without extensive editing and the deletion of many posts, I discovered this would have meant ending up with a 300-400 page book costing between 50 and 100 pounds. At which point, I lost interest. Then Blurb abandoned the blog slurper, so I stopped thinking about it.
But recently I came across Blog2Print. This is one of several similar services offering a "blog to book" facility, tailored to the various blogging platforms like Blogger, WordPress, etc. What sold Blog2Print to me was that the uploading process is very straightforward and surprisingly quick (although it's far from the best-designed user interface I've ever used) and, crucially, you can download your blog-book as a PDF file for a low, fixed price of $8.95: the number of pages is not a factor. Producing a printed version is a different matter: there, the page-count is all-important and, again, we're in £50-100 territory. But, once you are in possession of a reasonable-looking PDF of, say, an entire year's output, you can do what you like with it, in terms of editing, copying and distribution. I did actually check this, as it seemed too good to be true; there's a reason Blurb makes you buy a single hard-copy of your book before you can download it as a PDF or create a cheap e-book version!
As with any fully-automated process, it's not perfect. At its best, it looks like the screen-grab up top: a clean-looking mix of text and images, with a header and date derived from each post, plus a running title and page numbers. But text and images can be left hanging, awkwardly isolated on an otherwise blank page if you choose to have each post start on a fresh page, and any embedded links, picture captions, or block-quotations are poorly handled (see the screen-grab below). This is nothing that a bit of light tidying-up wouldn't fix, if you felt it necessary; PDF editing is no longer the mystery it once was. I don't feel the need, myself: these are perfectly readable e-books as it is, and I'm using them primarily as a form of insurance. If Blogger eventually goes the way of all free software, I'll always have these. Also, I do occasionally take a full XML backup [1] of the entire blog from Blogger (not many people seem to realise you can do this) and I see that other "blog to book" services work from this standard mark-up format, which may give a subtler result. If they, too, can give cheap PDF downloads without committing to buying a full paper version, I'll give them a try.
I suppose I could be persuaded to sell copies, probably on CD or DVD, or possibly USB flash-stick, if anyone was interested enough. I haven't really thought about it, but they needn't be expensive, given the low initial outlay. So far, there are nine files, each covering 1st September to 31st August [2], starting in 2008-09, and ending in 2016-17. Each is about 300-350 pages, and between 20 and 40 MB in size. I suppose it might even be fun to design a complete package in a proper DVD or CD "jewel" case, something I have often done in the past, when this blog's tenth anniversary comes round in September 2018.
If there were ever to be an actual book, though, it would have to be a single-volume "best of", ruthlessly selected from what has already become nearly 4,000 pages of text and nearly as many images. I think I'll leave posterity to think about the value of the sort of effort that would require. But, so long as the PDFs survive, my descendants will at least have the benefit of knowing in unprecedented (not to say excruciatingly tedious) detail how I spent my days, and what idle thoughts passed through my brain. And, if they can be bothered to read them carefully, they may also figure out why that crow keeps looking in at them through the window like that.
So, best wishes and good luck to you all in 2018! I think we're going to need it... What was that thing about living in Interesting Times? It seems that may be exactly where we have ended up in 2017.
[1] XML is worth knowing about, in principle, anyway. Libraries have been doing this for decades, but the agreement on a data mark-up standard has enabled all sorts of Web 2.0 "mashup" apps and services to be developed, when used together with the "Web Services" standard.
[2] I know... This means "this" year has eight months to go, despite today being New Year's Eve. But I started the blog in September 2008, and was still working in a university then: the academic year gets into your blood. Even our desk-diaries ran September to August! Although, as a professional contrarian, I always insisted on being given a "normal" one, starting in January.
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