Today SharedBook, a company I've been following since their appearance at Demo 2007, announced a book-printing widget for creating hard copy books from blogs. And unlike Blurb and HP (NYSE HPQ), who both selected other blog platforms for their first forays into Blog Printing, SharedBook's initial effort is centered on my blog platform of choice, Google's (NASDAQ GOOG) Blogger.
The other companies, book-based Blurb and office-and-home-printer-oriented HP, were gently chided here for their choices. But Blurb has since come around (and as I posted just last week I'm overdue to give their book-from-blog tool another chance), and I'm on the list of HP's beta Blogger users to try out their print widget, as originally commented on here last month.
So with a quiet summer I've got quite a few projects to experiment with! My first look at creating a book from the SharedBook tool was quite impressive and I encourage others to take a look. And the business models behind these three solutions all warrant much further comparison and discussion -- while Blurb seems to be more of a vanity press for bloggers, SharedBook has a model that combines personal blog book publishing with the assumption that there are at least some blogs out there that readers want to convert to books for their own use. HP is focused on readers of blogs, but only really seeking to play catch-up with all the popular news sites that feature "print-friendly" versions of their web content. And I know doubt will learn more as I get in deeper, so stay tuned!
The other companies, book-based Blurb and office-and-home-printer-oriented HP, were gently chided here for their choices. But Blurb has since come around (and as I posted just last week I'm overdue to give their book-from-blog tool another chance), and I'm on the list of HP's beta Blogger users to try out their print widget, as originally commented on here last month.
So with a quiet summer I've got quite a few projects to experiment with! My first look at creating a book from the SharedBook tool was quite impressive and I encourage others to take a look. And the business models behind these three solutions all warrant much further comparison and discussion -- while Blurb seems to be more of a vanity press for bloggers, SharedBook has a model that combines personal blog book publishing with the assumption that there are at least some blogs out there that readers want to convert to books for their own use. HP is focused on readers of blogs, but only really seeking to play catch-up with all the popular news sites that feature "print-friendly" versions of their web content. And I know doubt will learn more as I get in deeper, so stay tuned!
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