Mathbabe, the book by Cathy O’Neil.
From the post:
Thanks to a certain friendly neighborhood mathbabe reader, I’ve created this mathbabe book, which is essentially all of my posts that I ever wrote (I think. Note sure about that.) bundled together mostly by date and stuck in a huge pdf. It comes to 1,243 pages.
I did it using leanpub.com, which charges $0.99 per person who downloads the pdf. I’m not charging anything over that, because the way I look at it, it’s already free.
Speaking of that, I can see why I’d want a copy of this stuff, since it’s the best way I can think of to have a local version of a bunch of writing I’ve done over the past couple of years, but I don’t actually see why anyone else would. So please don’t think I’m expecting you to go buy this book! Even so, more than one reader has requested this, so here it is.
And one strange thing: I don’t think it required my password on WordPress.com to do it, I just needed the url for the RSS feed. So if you want to avoid paying 99 cents, I’m pretty sure you can go to leanpub or one of its competitors and create another, identical book using that same feed.
And for that matter you can also go build your own book about anything using these tools, which is pretty cool when you think about it. Readers, please tell me if there’s a way to do this that’s open source and free.
The Mathbabe “book” would be one that I would be interested in reading. I can think of several other blogs that fall into that category.
I hesitate to use the term “book” for such a collection.
Maybe I am confusing “monograph,” which is focused on a topic, with “book,” which applies to works beyond a certain length.
I think of my postings, once you remove the dated notice materials, as potential essays or chapters in a book.
But they would need fleshing out and polishing to qualify for more formal publication.