Experiment: blog in Kindle book form | Hacker News Reader

Experiment: blog in Kindle book form

cdixon.org

34 pointsjeffmiller8 comments

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 )

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.

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.

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.

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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.

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...

>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)

Some fellow HNers, dy and icco I believe, recently put together pg's essays in ePub and Mobi format. They're posted on Github: https://github.com/davidyang/Paul-Graham-s-Essays-Epub and the HN discussion is http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2443377

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.

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 * * *).

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