[Beyond Borders]

It's become more common for big names (in a variety of industries) to condense blog posts into a book manuscript and flesh out the holes to create a consolidated document.

What are your thoughts on this? Do you feel cheated when you buy such a book, or do you not read enough of their material online for it to make enough of a difference?

Do you buy the book version even if it's clear upfront you can get most of the material for free on their blog or website?

For me, the biggest issue I see is when the book is obviously a compilation of blog posts, as in the material reads like fluffy bite-sized chunks of content. The marketers who seem to be able to pull this off best are the ones that legitimately put their all into each blog article, making it as valuable as the chapter of any book.

It also seems best to plan this type of thing ahead of time rather than make it an afterthought.

Discuss.

[Checkmat]

Good topic to bring up. It's definitely something that's gaining traction it seems like since everyone has a blog these days.

I read Rollo Tomassi's book and had the same thoughts ref the formatting. Since the posts were written independently and months apart, a lot of the "chapters" repeat themselves over and over again with the same ideas.

There's also a weird vibe in reading a book that is constantly referencing blogs and web sites that you might not be familiar with (I never read anything from Rollo before reading his book). It's just one of those things where you're constantly reminded that this wasn't written as a book--it's all taken from an internet blog and put into e-book form.

I didn't feel cheated even if 90% of the material is available online. I don't like reading lengthy blog posts at a computer. It's far more enjoyable to me to read them all put together in one place on an e-book reader. There's also the fact like you brought up that I simply don't/haven't read much of his stuff online anyway so it was all new to me.

The biggest issue I had with it is the poor editing and formatting. A lot of the thoughts and chapters feel disjointed and don't flow together well. The ideas jump all over the place and are constantly being rehashed as if being introduced for the first time. You'll read a passage where he explains something like it's the first time (even if it's the fourth time in the book) and I kind of sighed and thought "that's right, this wasn't written as a book".

Overall I don't have a huge issue with it. It seems like books of this type are generally priced a little lower than normal books. You have guys like Roissy that have enough material out there in various forms for SEVERAL quality books and you can bet I would definitely lay down legit full-book price for his blog posts compiled into e-book form, provided the editing and formatting is coherent.

[w00t]

It really depends on how well its done. If its full of spelling errors, links to other websites/articles and the "chapters" are all over the place then I would feel kinda pissed if I spent money on that.

On the other hand check out a book like "The Entrepreneurs Guide to getting your shit together" by John Carlton, which is simply blog posts or his newsletter compiled into a book and sold for less than 10 bucks. The articles are amazing, there is an overall theme and its a cheap way to check out his way, especially since his usual courses are several hundred dollars each. In this case I never regretted spending money on it.