Heroes Not Zombies

March 11, 2008 by bobleckridge

I’ve just taken delivery of my first attempt to use blurb.com to produce a book. It’s fabulous. It was so easy to do and the quality of the hardback book I’ve received is way beyond my expectations. And for any fellow bloggers, it’s a real treat to be able to page through a hard copy of your blog. I really do recommend it.

I am SO thrilled with the result. Click here to go and see for yourself.

What I wanted to do was produce a hardback copy of my first year of blogging. The blurb service has a program to download called “booksmart” and you use this to create your books. Included in the program is a great tool called “blogslurp” which downloads a complete copy of your blog into a template on your hard drive. You can then edit every single page, choosing different page layouts, upgrading low resolution photos for higher resolution copies from your photo library, and deleting or adding any text you choose. You then hit “upload” and that’s it. If you want you can preview the book as a pdf but I didn’t bother. I chose the largest format hardback book they do.

I am delighted with the quality of the printed copy and it got to Scotland in less than 10 days from the time I hit the upload button.

Here are some photos of the book to give you an idea what it looks like.

Posted in creativity, from the reading room, photography, writing | Tagged blurb.com, book publishing | 9 Comments

9 Responses

on March 11, 2008 at 6:38 pm | Reply mrschili

Are you KIDDING?! I’m going to go check this out RIGHT NOW!
on March 11, 2008 at 7:55 pm | Reply Mike

Just found your blog and the first post is a winner!

Thanks for the information, your book looks beautiful.

Peace,
Mike
on March 11, 2008 at 10:27 pm | Reply homeopathy4health

Thank you for telling us about this. What a brilliant idea!

h4h
on March 11, 2008 at 10:50 pm | Reply mumof3sons

Wow! Well done, immortalised in print like a good few other erudite Scots.

I will be asking for an autograph next time I see you!

OMEDETO-O GOZAIMASU
on March 11, 2008 at 11:13 pm | Reply bobleckridge

Thanks for the enthusiasm mrschili. This was just an experiment but I do highly recommend doing it. Let me know how you get on/
Thank you Mike, hope you enjoy some of the other posts too.
on March 12, 2008 at 9:55 am | Reply Tawny

WOW, this is so inspiring, so nice for you to be able to see all those hours and hours of work in the flesh!
I looked at blurb.com just now, and it is definitely something I would think about doing in the future.
So you can just order one copy for yourself and that’s it, no pressure to order any more???
What a great idea,
thanks for that,
x
on March 12, 2008 at 10:03 am | Reply bobleckridge

Yes, Tawny, you can just do the one. Once it’s done though you can order as many copies as you want whenever you want – think they do discounts on bulk. Also they encourage you to list your book on their webstore (you don’t have to) where you can set a price for anyone else to buy a copy and blurb send you the difference between the print price and the purchase when anyone buys a copy (that’s not why I did this one but I might do other books for other people now that I’ve seen how easy and good it is)
on March 13, 2008 at 11:02 am | Reply rainbow9

As I enter my third month of blogging, I had the idea too when I started of collecting the writings at the end of a year- and now you have shown me how!!

Thank you again for being such an inspiration to me and others.

My daughter just had her interview for medical school- she will find out in May. She has been brought up with homeopathy, so it will
be interesting to see, if she gets in, how she will maneuver both worlds- I pray she will be a great doctor like you!
on March 15, 2008 at 12:13 am | Reply bobleckridge

Hey, rainbow9, thank you, thank you, thank you, for such positive comments and encouragement. I’ll keep my fingers crossed for your daughter’s medical school application. Do let me know how things turn out