§calcwars twitter book.

Another week, another hack-day. And another book made from twitter feeds.

I was so pleased with the hardback version of my twitter book that I knew I had to make another book. And quickly.

At the Warblecamp hackday last Saturday/Sunday I set about making book from one of the twitter events I’d been following. The Twitter Calculus Wars is a fun project where three Algebra students from Michigan replayed the famous Newton/Leibniz rivalry on twitter.

I took their excellent work and turned it, along with some footnotes from wikipedia, into a 60 page book. You can download the final PDF here.

That was on Monday. The first printed copy of it arrived today (Friday). That’s just four days – some excellent service from lulu.com. It looks like it was printed in Eastbourne, whereas the hardback I’d previously had printed came from the states and took a bit longer.

Here it is:

I’m very, very happy with it. It feels like a book. I had worried that it wouldn’t – that it’d be too contrived, or there’d be some terrible flaw in the design that I hadn’t noticed, or that it just wouldn’t work in some way. But, it feels like a book.

The fonts work well, and I’ve learnt lots about the differences between screen and print. Some things that are difficult on the screen, work well in print – in this case, I was worried that using different fonts for footnotes and body copy would confuse. And on screen, it does somewhat; in print, it actually works well.

One other thing I learnt is that next time I’m making a twitter book, I’ll probably need to choose a font that has a hash (#) character. I had to cheat throughout and use the section mark (§) instead.

It’s a long while since I made something that I’m really proud of and that I don’t feel is compromised in some way. I’m getting back a lot of the confidence I’ve lacked recently, I think.

Anyhow, it’s easy and fun to get a book printed, and it’s pretty cheap too. It cost me $6 or thereabouts to get the copy printed and another $10 in super-express-do-whatever-it-takes-to-get-it-to-me-now postage. There are cheaper postage options available, if you’re more patient than I am.

The techniques I used were the same as with my twitter_book project. Firt, ruby scripts to pull tweets from twitter (and also wikipedia in this case) and emit some xml. Then, an xsl stylesheet to convert that xml into something I could feed into Apache fop. The resulting pdf was uploaded straight into lulu.com.

All of this makes me want to make another one. And quickly. Keeping my eyes open for ideas…

Tags: book, calcwars, lulu, twitter, warblecamp