Where’s Treve 2021: The Book

My first blog entry appeared on September 18, 2015. That was a very short post about the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Since then I’ve been posting blog entries on a regular basis, and early on in the process I decided it would be fun to publish the blog entries in a series of books. I’m happy to announce that the blog entries for 2021 are now available in print. This volume was printed using Blurb.com. Click here to see a preview and to order a copy.

Going from a blog that is designed to be read on an electronic device to a printed book is not as straightforward as you might think. I’ll have to thank my wife, Joann, for her creativity and perseverance in taking the blog entries and massaging the content into a format that works as a printed book. The blog is presented as a stream of information you can scroll down to read. The book I envisioned was a coffee table book, with the pages laid out in a landscape or horizontal format.

Here you see a clip from the bog about our recent trip to Baja, and the corresponding page from the book. Note that on the blog we have a movie that traces the route of the trip, while in the book, we have a map that corresponds to the movie.

In the blog I typically group three images together in a tiled gallery, with the text flowing above and below the images. In the book, the placement of the images and text may vary. Many of the posts include links to galleries that contain additional photos. Those links do not appear in the book.

While there are a number of resources available to convert a blog to a book, none of the available resources were suitable for our needs—at least that was our experience when we first explored the possibilities in 2015. Our goal was a coffee table book that was visually interesting and faithful to the content of the blog.

We currently lay out the book in Adobe InDesign, and publish the books with Blurb. Joann keeps up with my blog entries, so when the year ends we just basically push the button to publish. In prior years we’ve used Shutterfly for publishing the book. I like Blurb because you can download the PDF as a backup, and you can monetize the book through Blurb. I don’t imagine I’ll be selling many of the books that represent the blog. I have, however sold a few of the other books we’ve created.

It may be time to revisit some of the applications for converting a blog to a book. As I write this I see that there are a number of new applications for converting a blog to a book; some of those look promising. Stay tuned. I’ll have more about this after we take a closer look at some of the options.