Five Years After I Asked for It, It's Here!

To my own not-so-easily-perked-these-days amazement, I read on Lisa's blog about this blog slurper book thing. In short, Blurb apparently lets you "slurp your blog into Blurb’s BookSmart™ software to create a bookstore-quality book, and end up with a permanent and portable archive to share with others."

Been looking for something like this?

Shhheah!

Five years ago I asked a way to export content in this meaningful way. Hey, I'm patient. And I'm willing to give it a try. Book Slurper says it does some pretty cool stuff:

• Imports and maps blog text, images, comments, and links into a professionally designed template, producing a draft book in real time
• Allows you to customize and edit your book as little or as much as you like
• Creates bookstore-quality books up to 440 pages, with professional printing and binding

Not sure about their business model or pricing -- sounds like a downer to me. They need to find a way to REWARD self-publishers for longevity and heavy-content (because they will tend to bring more buyers), not tax them for books over 40 pages.

You pay only when you publish your book. Books up to 40 pages start at $12.95 – see pricing table for details.

Not sure about the backend publishing part either--real creativity needs to happen there to help bloggers make it worth their while rather than just cutting and pasting into a PDF and using lulu. Why should I pay $12.95 to publish 40 slurpped pages of my blog? I can go copy out 40 pages worth--it's the 5,000 posts over six years that I need to slurp.

I'll be digging in to check this thing out and either signing on or waiting for the open source version. Stay tuned.