I recently decided to repurpose my website: Kel.Zone. It’s been a 30th anniversary celebration site, marking the kelzone website efforts I’ve undertaken over the past three decades; I’ve had kelzone.com in some form or another since the early 1990s. But highly suspicious activity prompted me to consider what I wanted to do with the site going forward.
It’s hard to let a website go and I’ve really enjoyed this one in particular. I didn’t want it to simply disappear the way all the ones have done before (unless they’re captured by the Web Archive machine, like this one of mine from 1999). I’d read about services that turn websites into books so I investigated.
I decided to give PixxiBook a try. And I’ll say right up front: WOW!
If you want ultimate control, go elsewhere. Pixxi makes the process very quick and simple. They don’t support editing of the text and photos or control over the layout of each page. If you want that, fix up the blog posts ahead of time. That limitation was fine with me. I do enough of that with high content books. I literally spent less than 30 minutes on my book.
You can select what you want included in your book based on your categories and tags. That helps you control the number of pages because, of course, the more pages the more expensive the book will be.
I didn’t think the overall cost of my book to be unreasonably expensive given what I was getting.
Mine is an A4 (8.5” x 11”), photo quality, hardback book of 222 pages. Thick, glossy paper. Well bound and very sturdy. It’s like an amazing Coffee Table Book. Pixxi has a page limit of 300 pages. You want more than that, the content is automatically split into multiple volumes.
It is not indexed and the pages are not numbered. Again, fine with me! I just wanted a keepsake of the work I’ve done on kel.zone over the past two years. It does not have an ISBN and they don’t offer any marketing options. You don’t get the source code for the product. That’s not something I was interested in but I can see where it’s a feature that would be beneficial in different circumstances. Perhaps they’ll add that feature in the future. They have a slate of features they’re planning which you can read about in their FAQ.
In addition to selecting the content I wanted included, I also decided how the title page should look and what the wrapped cover art should be (also had a choice for automatically creating a cover of collage images from the blog). The hardcover has a stain-resistant matt-finish.
Lots of my posts on kel.zone included links to YouTube videos and other media. The way Pixxi handles that is by providing QR codes. Scan the code with your phone and view the content at its source.
Kel.Zone utilizes Wordpress. From Pixxi FAQ:
We currently all of the major blog platforms, including Wordpress (including third-party hosts and self-hosted using the wordpress.org distribution), Blogger (sometimes referred to as Blogspot), Squarespace (v7 only, the current version), Wix and Tumblr. Together these cover approximately 75% of all blogs.
Support for Instagram and Travelark are newly added options.
One of my posts contains lots of pictures from a vacation to Frankfort, Kentucky. I was very pleased with the quality and automatic page design for the photos in that post and other similar posts. I like how they made the page color black which made the photos pop.
So, overall, I am extremely pleased with the book. Even the price, $122, is very reasonable and includes everything; the book, the shipping (it’s kinda heavy!), and sales tax. It’s a lot of money for people, I know that, but this is a large book (200+ pages!) and the quality makes it a generational keepsake. I was expecting something much more expensive.
I archived my website, and I’m starting to make changes to it now. I feel comfortable doing that because I have this fine memento.
There may be other, better, options out there but for ease of use, speed in receiving the product, and very reasonable cost for what you receive, I highly recommend PixxiBook.
From their YouTube channel:
And I have not received any benefit, promotion, or support from PixxiBook for this post. Just sayin.
Note: Updated to include tags.
Not in the FAQs that FB is supported but doesn’t cost anything to try.
How is the color quality and light quality of the photos in the book compared to the same photo in the blog posts? Thank you for sharing.