Tag: paper

After connected paper, the digital is materialized again!

Posted on by wsb

Paper is approximatively 3000 years old and it’s not ready to disappear.

On the contrary, paper has recently known a renewal thanks to the cohabitation with its sworn enemy!  The digital.

Nowadays, digital and book are no longer contradictory, but they complement each other. `

We all know QR codes or Flash codes. Children books now offer augmented reality, packagings of frozen fish tell us many informations about the product and where it’s been fished, the specie, the receipes you can cook with it.

Connected paper allows the readers, the companies and the brands to use a new space of information and communication thanks to our smartphone’s screen.

A girl on the street taking a picture with her phone

Thanks to digital technologies and databases, printing companies like Maqprint are able to print very customized contents and deliver documents limited to only a few people.

Part or all the elements (texts, pictures, graphs, colors, lay-out) composing a document or a book can be different from one another, allowing to target more efficiently the needs of the customers or readers.

Digital combined to databases opens up to the possibility of various marketing scripts. So, tomorrow an airline company could offer on-board customized magazines to travellers according to their own interests.

Proof that digital and paper mustn’t be opposed is BlookUp 

A paper book connected to a computer

Since 4 years, BlookUp offers to print books from personal blogs.

Today thanks to a reversed technology we lay-out digital flows, texts and pictures to turn them into real paper books.

Reasons to materialize your blog again are numerous. To keep a track of your writings, save it because you are afraid to loose it one day, and to offer it and share your book (books are a great gift!) or to sell it to other readers!

Making your “blook” (contraction of the words “blog” and “book”) is a great thing to do.

So, you can love digital, blogs, social networks… But also the smell of a new book, the touch of the paper, the pleasure to show it to others, commenting moments of your life around a nice and beautiful paper book.

A paper book opened in front of flowers

Print the book of your WordPress blog

Posted on by wsb

You have a blog on WordPress that you have created several months or several years ago? Do you regularly publish posts and pictures on this private space? Like many people that are passionate? You invest your time and energy to make you blog everyday and like many people, you maybe tell yourself that it would be great if you could one day print the book of your blog. All to keep track of its digital content!

Well, thanks to BlookUp it’s now possible. To save your content, print it for yourself or to offer to others! We have made printing a blog  a reality for all bloggers.

an open blog book

Continue reading “Print the book of your WordPress blog” →

Meeting with Frank, a basket lover and a blooker!

Posted on by wsb

Two men on a basketball court

  • Tell us about yourself

Passionate about basket but also about writing, I opened Hoop Diary 7 years ago. First, it was a blog hosted on the website basketsession, and it was one of the “star blogs”. Then, the website was closed and I’ve created Hoop Diary on WordPress, to save all my writings.

I’m still very invested in the basket’s world, as a trainer after being Development Director for a minor ligue.

  • What is your blog about?

The first posts was really about my experience as a player and as a trainer, and my thoughts about it. My blog also contains videos of my trainings, it allows me to keep them somewhere.

Then, I’ve wanted to share stories around Toulouse’s basket, before they were forgotten. Finally, Hoop Diary became the website for all the pyrenean basket, some of my posts were shared on other websites.

At last, there are many categories on my blog, including “les routards du basket” (I retrace the steps of big players), “Hoop” (where I highlight picturest grounds). This last category gave birth to my Instagram account.

  • Why did you decide to print your  basketball blog?

I’ve always been fascinated by books, in general. A furnished library is the most valuable thing in my house! Print my blog was the chance for me to keep a paper track of my writings and give body to them thanks to the book. I also intend to publish my own book one day, about the pyrenean basket’s history.

  • How did you know BlookUp?

Thanks to a Valentine’s Day gift! My wife printed my Instagram account, and then I had my blog printed. She’s a blogger too, that’s how she discovered BlookUp.

  • What are the positive points?

The possibility to sort, organize the posts. It’s very easy.

A book with basketball instagram pictures

  • How can we improve our service?

More choices for the covers (colors, photos…). Some posts were in two different categories, so it was a little hard to classify them.

  • What do you think of your basketball blook?

The result is good, with quality paper. Regarding the Instagram blook, I think it’s perfect!

A book with instagram basketball pictures

  • What does your family think about your basketball blook?

The feedbacks are very positive, it gives a new life to my blog and allows them to dive into the posts again!

  • Would your recommend BlookUp?

Yes I would recommend BlookUp, and I will certainly make another blook in a while!

Two backcovers of basketball picture books

The digital book more expensive than the printed book?

Posted on by wsb

a book icon on a screen representing a digital book The question remains unsettled. It would seem that the model business of the digital book is not still good establishes.

A blogger enjoied making a comparative study. In every case, the digital book is more expensive than paper book!

It is a real problem when we know, and we are placed well for the knowledge in the edition of books of blogs, that one of the main costs it is paper (60 % of the price in self-publishing, even if certainly the technique of printing is different).

What is interesting it is to deal with comments, debates and claiming of the Internet users, on the subject.

Between the ecology, the remuneration for the authors, the hacking, the boycott of the publishers. Everyone brings his own arguments. The digital debate vs paper extends in the infinity. But does the debate really exist? Each should have the choice of lira on the support of its choice, the whole being only a packaging of contents.

Should not the publishers and the booksellers more anticipate and to reposition with regard to this advance of the digital technology in their world, rather than to make understand, in a clarify way, that they are not still ready for the digital technology?

CREATE THE BOOK OF MY BLOG

A paper book : could you change it ?

Posted on by wsb

That is what we could soon hear in the mouth of the youngest!  The generation “digital native” been born a transplanted keyboard left hand and a smartphone right hand.

If 98 % of the young people prefer to read on paper rather than on screen. The question is whether the paper will always have so many followers when this “digital natives” will reach the age to be bibliophiles?

Maybe what is more for this new generation, the expression ” to turn over a new leaf” will be transformed there “to refresh the page”, more adequate to what defines the current digital page.

Be up to date!

Turn in a loop !  The record is crossed off!  Will these expressions have only another sense tomorrow? Or will they have become unusual since the progressive disappearance of their support? Mp3 havetaken an important place in the current musical consumption. It is logically that the market of the Compact disc tends to disappear. Already met phenomenon there are more than about twenty year with the extinction of the vinyl for the benefit of Said CD.

For the book and the appearance of its malefic double.

The digital book, it is about a similar foundation. Real debate, the dematerialization of the book causes the same debates today which enamelled the passage in the digital photography and in the dematerialized music. Paper book(pound) Vs digital book there will be there only one? Which? And why not both if we take into account economic data and sociological?

The paper book, the museum piece or the collector’s edition?

In the coming years, we are going to observe a “collector’s” future of the paper book in front of development of his digital antagonist? It is also the difference!  The material. Between paper and digital support, the material entraine this clear quality gap, the paper becomes a luxury object in the face of a dematerialized support. Actually, hypothetically, it is not impossible that the digital book comes to replace the paperback.

The future of the book, the Print-On Demand?

A complete report has just been made in May by the Association of College and Research libraries on “the scenarios for the future of the book”.

Indeed; it explores 4 alternatives with which can be confronted the book. Since almost disappearance of the paper book for the benefit of the digital technology or mutually, the failure of the ebook because of a too expensive technology and which does not convince the readers, certain data are however common to all the scenarios:

  1. The technology of the printed books does not go out but occupies a position, a different function. Let us remember ourselves that even if the electricity produces the light, candles kept a status mattering in our company)
  2. The readers of books are less numerous
  3. A new phenomenon expands! Print-On Demand.

 

However, in 2020, the creation and the publication of books will be less expensive and easier. We shall not find any more only authors’ big names! A lot of people unknowns will self-publish their own paper books to share their papers with friends or to keep a track of things, facts. In these conditions the ISBN will not be any more an essential component of the book and there will be more and more titles of books of fiction, short stories, poems, theories.

The authors continues to find that the paper book is more taken seriously than his digital counterpart! And the paper books becomes the new business cards. Leave me your book, I would tell you what you are worth.

The world continues to be invaded by the paper book!  Therefore ironically it will be made possible by the digital technologies.

A baby reading a paper book Will the new generation still read paper books?