
Experiment: blog in Kindle book form - jeffmiller
http://cdixon.org/2011/04/18/experiment-blog-in-kindle-book-form/
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davidw
PDF is a terrible format to submit to the Kindle store. If you want some help,
and you're donating all of your proceeds to charity, maybe I can help set you
up with something at LiberWriter ( <http://www.liberwriter.com> )

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sliverstorm
Yes, an excellent point to remember. PDF's are de-facto any time you want to
control the content in some fashion (formatting, copy/pasting, etc), and they
do a good job- but the thing about e-readers is they _need_ to be in control
the formatting of the content.

This is why ebook formats (mobi, epub, even azw) are important.

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noahlt
I was a bit disappointed to find that this was a Kindle book that repackaged a
bunch of already-published blog posts, rather than some clever way to publish
a blog that would be delivered as a periodically-updated Kindle book.

Nevertheless, this is a cool idea. I'd love to see one for Paul Graham's
essays (including those written after _Hackers and Painters_ was published)
and Steve Yegge's old blog.

I also find it strange that Amazon forces you to charge a minimum of $.99, but
I suppose that's their way of making sure that they can pay for hosting.

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marcelam
This is similar to an idea I was thinking about a couple months ago - a
marketplace for microbooks (similar to how apps are super-specific programs,
microbooks would be super-specific topics for books).

Here's a write-up of my idea: using analytics (maybe even adding Google
Analytics API integration) to make microbooks from blogs and setting up a
marketplace for them.

Having the book periodically update itself would be a neat twist.

\---

There are millions of bloggers around the world, each with their own niche -
be it bento cooking, or hiking in remote regions, or celebrity clothing. Blogs
are organized for time -- the latest and greatest, the newest, not really for
exploration or diving deeply into a topic.

Maybe you're planning a trip to New Zealand, and you'd love to buy "10 Lord of
the Rings Hikes in the South Island" or "Foods only New Zealanders Eat" -- the
type of content that you find online in blogs of people who are passionate
about these topics, but that are difficult to find at your local bookstore.

Wouldn't it be great if you could find a library of these topics that are only
found in blogs, already organized for your buying pleasure? It's similar to
Apple's app store, where instead of having a huge piece of software that does
multiple things (e.g., a scientific calculator is like a whole book of travel
on New Zealand), you buy a small, targeted app (e.g. a tip calculator).

The service would work like this:

1\. Bloggers would input their blog url 2\. The service would automatically
analyze the content, looking for engagement (most comments), content,
trackbacks. It would look deeply for similar topics (e.g., types of bento,
countries, clothing styles) or broadly for a "variety pack". (It would be
great to integrate this with analytics for page views and visits, or user
paths through a site). A simple first start to bypass some of the algorithmic
complexities might even be to offer "The Best of 101Cookbooks", that looks for
the most popular posts in a blog. 3\. The blogger chooses a template for the
microbook, reviews the proposed books (and probably writes the title, as it
seems difficult to automatically generate an interesting title), and that's
it! They're given a small widget which they can incorporate into their own
blog that will lead to the microbook store. (It'd be fun to generate template
colors or even templates from the blog itself...) 4\. The service posts the
approved microbook in the store (and cross-posts the listing in the Amazon
store, or the iBook store).

The idea is basically a self-publishing platform for ebooks, but basing it off
of blogs would be a way to fill up the empty playground. Competitors might
include Lulu, a self-publishing company, and perhaps Amazon (although there
would be a synergy with Amazon selling these shorter ebooks). However, there
would be the IP advantage of the technology to analyze blogs and create
grouped topics for book suggestions. I see this as similar to the Apple App
store, where microbooks would sell for low prices (most 99c) and the service
would take a cut of sales as the business model (the ebook creation would be
free, although premium features could be added).

The biggest problem would be DRM - after the book creation, there's very
little that would stop a blogger from selling it separately on their own site.
An argument against this would be traffic from the marketplace and the
activation energy required to actually set up a payment system on the blog,
although just providing a widget would help with that.

"Why would I pay for it, when I can read the blog for free?" Sure, one can
browse the blog, but you're limited to either looking chronologically through
every post, or hoping that "related posts" will take you to the right place.
This service would organize the content for you, in an elegant, awe-inspiring,
pixel-perfect design.

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peterarmstrong
We do something similar to this at Leanpub (<http://leanpub.com>): a blogger
can enter their blog RSS feed URL, we import the blog, clean the HTML and put
it into a Dropbox folder. The user can then click a button and we publish to
PDF, MOBI and EPUB.

The part we don't do is the automatic scraping of related content, and the
reason we don't do it is that chances are you don't own the copyright to it.
(We don't even include blog comments, since we're not sure about the copyright
issues there.)

We're bootstrapped and doing customer development, so any feedback would be
welcome...

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dr_
I think it's actually a good idea that Amazon forces a minimum price of $0.99.
Otherwise it could potentially serve as a way for certain special interest
groups to just spread free propaganda, which could detract from the Kindle
environment in general. Personally I feel when you pay for something, a book,
a service or whatever, you are more likely to use it for it's intended
purpose.

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microkernel
To get a frequently updated version set a recipe up at <http://readbeam.com>.
It's easy, just did this with TechCrunch and it worked nicely. (This
functionality is still in beta but is expected to be released end of this
week) So I get all the feed articles mailed right on my Kindle every day at 6
am and 6 pm (0 6,18 * * *).

