All this reading and criticizing of books has me fevered up with the I-wanna-write-a-book bug. Problem is, writing a book is hard, and takes a long time. And I’m lazy, and I haven’t got any good ideas.

But I still wanna write a book!

Being Mr Computer Guy for so long is making me go strange for the corporeal. Since so much of what I do exists only in the form of bits and bytes, I feel a growing need to create something physical, something real that I can actually hold in my hands. Something that can continue to exist without a computer, without electricity. Unfortunately, in the real world I have no manual skills. Everything I know is in my head, and all my hands know how to do is type.

And so, I want to write a book. More specifically, I want to make a book. With real pages, and a real cover.

So I have sort of made a book

Yes, rather than writing a whole lot of new words, I thought my needs might be satisfied by collecting a whole lot of old ones together instead. This handsome one volume set comprises all JujuBlog entries from the before-time right through to my recent 32nd birthday [which seemed a fitting cutoff point].

That’s 266 scintillating entries crammed into 256 sizzling pages!

Of course, clicking on links won’t work [but isn't this whole hypertext thing getting old anyway?] there is no color printing except for the cover, and it’s not searchable, except in the old-fashioned sense. On the plus side, it does have a table of contents, and it will continue to function even if you spill coffee all over it.

The cover design is a total knockoff of a 1963 edition of Fail-Safe. It only took me about fifty bajillion hours to create, so I’m very proud. Note that I avoided the temptation to add fake creases and scuff marks, since I want it to look like a brand new shoddy old book.

CafePress is the printer I am using, largely because they apply no set up fee. Read my previous post on their publishing service, as well as my first impressions of a test book I had printed. I won’t actually put up a link to the CafePress product page until I have received the copy I just ordered and verified that it’s all hunky dory.

How to make a book from a blog

1. Pick a size and format. CafePress has only certain sizes and binding types available, and for this book I decided to go with perfect-bound 5" x 8".
2. Create front and back cover art to desired size [at least 150 DPI]. Be sure to spend as much time as possible on this. Don’t finalize the spine yet, because unless you’re very smart you don’t yet know how thick the book will be.
3. Create a special massive HTML page featuring every single blog entry. This was done using the same system I use to maintain the main page of this blog, so in this case it was a no-brainer.
4. Import the HTML into OpenOffice.org to finalize print layout. This was not as much work as it might sound, with most tasks being in some way automatable.
   1. convert to native SXW format.
   2. set new page size [very important!].
   3. visually scan for pagination issues and manually change where necessary.
   4. add page headers and footers.
   5. add table of contents [automatically generated from headings within the entries].
   6. fiddle with margins and font sizes until page count is an exact power of two, giving you bonus nerd points.
5. Export to PDF. PDF is one of my least favourite formats, because it is overhyped and overused [how many times have I jabbed at the stop button yelling "Cancel Cancel Cancel!!!" when I realize a link is taking me directly to some bloated PDF document]. But the one thing it is good for is creating a "ready for print" document, where the layout is effectively written in stone.
6. Upload PDF to CafePress.
7. Download image template for the cover’s spine, which is generated to match the number of pages in your uploaded document. Spend a few more hours tweaking the cover, then upload front, back and spine images to CafePress.
8. Select CafePress price, category, title, blurb etc for the book.
9. ???
10. Profit!

I really love doing this kind of stuff, especially when I know that there are far more productive ways to use my time. The keen observer will have noticed that this entire blog is in fact a poorly disguised giant time-wasting machine, designed primarily to prevent me from focusing on the many tasks awaiting completion [eg updating all my beta software that expires at the end of this month!]