SoFoBoMo is mostly over for me, but I greatly enjoy browsing through the other books that have been created this year. There are 125 complete books so far, and there is still no end to it. I haven’t seen all of them, it’s more like one or two a day, thus I’ll speak the last congratulations probably next year, at a time when those people work on their next book 🙂
By the way, speaking of books, yesterday I got two packages from Blurb, one with the first version where I had not yet found out how to properly design the dust jacket in BookSmart, and one with the final version.
I wanted to wait and see if the quality is any good, before I go and announce the book.
Well, it is. I had expected little flaws, but both books are very well printed and bound, the quality is as high as one could expect from a book bought in the next book store, and color management was a complete non-issue.
Of course the images have less vibrant colors than on my monitor, but that was to be expected. Ink on paper has another gamut than my monitor, but the colors translate in a very natural way, leaving the images completely intact. I had saved my pages as images in sRGB and simply dropped them into BookSmart. Maybe using their color managed workflow would have produced even better results, but at least last year Doug Plummer found it to be lacking. I’m not even sure if Blurb still offers it. Anyway. As I said, it’s a non-issue.
I already mentioned it in a comment on Colin Jago’s blog, when I congratulated him to his simply wonderful book “No Waiting”, holding your book in hands, printed and bound, that’s an extremely satisfying experience. Even if nobody but me may ever buy this book, it is still satisfying. I don’t know why. It may be a little bit of fooling yourself, but it feels good anyway. Thus, if you participated in SoFoBoMo and you wanted to stop at the PDF: think twice! Most of the work is already done. Exporting the pages to BookSmart is not much work and the reward is an incredibly good feeling. Btw, having it printed may be the only way to show it to a lot of people, parents frequently included.
The Image of the Day is a view from a window in the stairwell of the house where I live in Vienna. It’s another experiment with the Alien Skin plugin Snap Art. Actually I like it pretty much, the more, the longer I play with it, and I guess I’ll end up buying it. It’s nothing that I’d want to use every day (yesterday I tried and didn’t), but sometimes the simplifying effect fits the image well. It’s simplification and generalization at the same time. There may be more of it coming.
The Song of the Day is “Standing At My Window” by delta blues singer and guitarist Arthur “Big Boy” Crudup. I have it on disc 55 of “The Ultimate Jazz Archive”, but you may get it on “Complete Recorded Works, Vol. 1 (1941-1946)” as well. Hear it on Deezer.