My Blog Book Review

So my blog book did end up coming today and I love it! I got mine from SharedBook.com. I honestly didn't even try any other places.... which is weird, I usually shop around, but I was on a friends blog and read their experience with Shared Book, so I just went with same place. Besides the actual book, Shared Book also had another cool thing you could do, and it was cheap. You could put your blog address in, and it made it into an e-book. It was under $3 to have them do that. That's where it looks like a book on your computer, you can zoom in and flip through the pages. He's a weird thing though, the e-book and the printed book had to be done in different transactions. I couldn't add both to my cart at the same time. When you put your blog address in, it puts together the e-book and you can preview it page by page, and that is the same way your printed book will be laid out. I didn't actually preview too many of the pages. I got to chose the front cover picture, and when it came the very first picture on my blog was the picture on the back of the book (which, incidentally is a picture of Anaya, so she thinks she owns the thing.....) You have the option of choosing a hard back book, or a paperback book. There was about a $10 difference, and I went for the hard back book. It reminds me of my high school year books as far as the size and feel of the book. I'm not too impressed with the binding though, and already it looks like it's not going to last very long..... I might end up spiral binding it.


I have the same layout for each of my blog entries: pictures centered above the text. I like the way this looks, but the format in the book is pictures on the left and text on the right, so my picture captions are all off. Makes more sense to do it that way though... less wasted space on the pages. So I might play around with my blog format this year and see how it looks next year.


All the blog comments are in the back of the book. So the last 38 pages of my blog book are comments. I started my blog the middle of February last year, and I ended up with 140 pages in all in my book, and including shipping paid a little more than $50. Cheap compared to scrapbooking, and a lot more content (just not as creative and cutesy.) The pictures were great quality and the text it easy to read.


The book has been a huge hit, and I have loved flipping through it remembering the last year. There are tons of pictures, which I like, because I take lots of pictures, but I'm not very good at getting them printed, and the blog book kind of takes care of that for me, and has them all together and dated. I really love it and wish I could go back and get the first 15 years of my marriage all printed and together like this (so don't be surprised if I do some reminiscing this year on my blog!) My pictures really don't do it justice, everything looks much better in person.