Thoughts on Clay Shirky’s “Cognitive Surplus,” Bound (via Anthologize)

I’ve been meaning for a while to return to experimenting with Anthologize, a WordPress plug-in that allows one to turn blog posts into electronic books. Anthologize was prototyped in a single week this summer during the One Week | One Tool project hosted by the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University. I tried Anthologize right after it was released, but it was still pretty buggy at that point so I decided to experiment with it later. Since that time most of the bugs appear to have been worked out, so it’s time for round two for me.

I’ve been referencing my series of posts this summer and fall on Clay Shirky’s new book Cognitive Surplus a lot lately, so I thought having those posts in one convenient place would be, well, convenient. After making sure I had the most recent version of Anthologize, I created a project within the tool and added the eight posts I wrote about Cognitive Surplus. I then exported this short ebook as a PDF and an ePub. Go ahead, click on those links and see how they turned out.

The PDF looks a little weird due to some unnecessary blank space in the file and some trouble handling a few characters (like quotation marks) here and there, but the ePub looks great on my Droid. I’m guessing the ePub will look pretty good on whatever device you use to read ebooks.

With the bugs worked out, Anthologize is a useful plug-in for WordPress. I hope the development team keeps working on it, in part because it’s still a little quirky and in part because I see a lot of potential for it as a self-publishing tool.

Have you tried Anthologize? What’s your take on the tool?