Convert Your Blog to Book – Pothi Launches BookSmith

January 5, 2010

By sinha

Blogger’s dream come true, if you ask me. You can now convert your blog (rather any blog’s posts) to pdf and download them as ebook or buy a printed copy of the same.

In order to use Booksmith, all you need to do is enter the blog url (supports wordpress and blogspot) and select posts that you want to have in the pdf.

Since most of the blog feeds support only 10 posts (by default), this feature has a restriction (which Pothi can’t do much about). But if you are the blog owner, you can select any number of posts and have them in the pdf.

Blog to Book (pdf) using Pothi's Blogsmith

This is an interesting feature, but here is a question to Pothi team– what is the target segment for this feature? Bloggers or Readers?

Readers can’t be, since they don’t have the luxury to print beyond 10 posts (or whatever is the default chosen by the blog).

As far as blog owners are concerned, how many of them are comfortable sharing login/password on a third party site? I am not and most importantly, blog owners would rather use a plugin that helps them customize the offering (for instance, print posts from a specific category).

Current offering takes the raw RSS feed and the junk that’s associated with each and every post (for instance copyright information/related posts etc), and that’s one area that Pothi needs to work on.

A wordpress plugin (there are few of them who can help you convert blog to pdf, for e.g. blogbooker and wptex ) is what makes it a viable play. Most importantly, the team needs to figure out the printing part (which is their core business model) – how will they convert pdf exporters to printers?

What extra services do you can they render to bloggers, for Booksmith to be an interesting play?

Read : The Future of Book Retailing in India (contributed by Pothi cofounder, Abhaya)

Tags: convert blog to pdf documents, pothi

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saipothuri on January 5, 2010 at 10:02 pm

Hello

Well a new task, with new queries.In my mind what i first thought is that this will be useful for people who write up blogs on single point either it might be a technology side, business management side, travels side etc etc

Because here if u take a travel blog where only travel details will be posted and discussions will be there on those posts, so for readers sake if the blog owner wants to update his readers with a pdf file, where only the posts that got posted in that month that will be good and people can go through it easily

For max blogs many things are posted some posts are from some sort of news, some sort of family gossips, some sort of other stuff from different sources from internet this wont be much useful, as no one cant read all those topics in a time.

So i prefer bloggers who concentrate on single topic can use this feature a best mode and update his readers, where readers if they really like some posts they can download and save it and even can print easily

What you think please let me know

Thanks & Regards

Sai Pothuri

Ashish on January 5, 2010 at 10:10 pm

Good point!
“So i prefer bloggers who concentrate on single topic can use this feature a best mode and update his readers, where readers if they really like some posts they can download and save it and even can print easily” – echoes my use case of using this service

Abhaya Agarwal on January 6, 2010 at 11:35 am

Thanks for having a look Ashish. Feedback from you and from readers of Pluggd.in is always useful.

Just wanted to clarify about the 10 posts thing – that only happens when the feed has been redirected to feedburner or a similar third party service. From directly accessible feeds, we can pull out any number of posts (irrespective of the default chosen by the site for the RSS feed). Since we anticipated the unwillingness of people to provide their blog username and password to an unknown site, we worked hard to make the service as usable as possible even without that.

Regarding the use cases, apart from the many interesting ones for the already existing blogs, I like to think about what could blogs be used for if they could be easily turned into books. That opens up many possibilities which we will try to highlight more in time to come! Stay tuned.

Abhaya

Sriyansa on January 6, 2010 at 2:44 pm

In a country like India, this could be the first step in a publication chain that caters equally well to both a connected and non-connected audience.

Think of sending out weekly/monthly magazines by post, except that it also a blog.