And the lists aren’t nearly so useful without your annotations, which are… trapped in ink on paper.

I did (and still do) provide the set of blogs on the web, so the URLs could be clicked directly (if you have software that can read an .xls file)–but your points are well taken.

Hmm. I need to think about that more. Not for those books–they may or may not simply go away at the end of the year–but for other things.

If I accept your premise and conclude that there’s no way to make “this kind of project” work as a book, then I should also simply drop The Liblog Landscape now and spend my time elsewhere–since there’s no way I can make it work as a web project, frankly.

(As for up-front sponsorship, “whistling up the wind” is how I regard that possibility, even as I mention it: I’m not in a library school and don’t have grant-writers backing me up, so the chances are nearly nil.)

Update: Come to think of it, The Liblog Landscape really isn’t “this kind of project”–at least I don’t think it is. And if I did a library blogs project again, it would primarily be about the landscape and changes in that landscape, and only secondarily about finding blogs. I think there was a need there, and I think Dorothea may be right on the relationship of these books to that need.

The printed book was simply the wrong information-delivery vehicle for this project.

Consider: I find a blog that looks interesting. I have to open up my browser and type in its URL, or Google for it; either process is error-prone. I want to compare it to another blog found on a different page. This involves the cognitive load of deciding whether to flip back and forth in the book, or open both blogs in my browser (with the attendant typing of yet another URL).

If I find a blog I like and want to save, the printed book does not help me remember it where remembrance is most useful: namely, my browser or my del.icio.us or my FriendFeed. Likewise, if I’ve been reading it for a while and want to refresh my memory on what you said about it, I have to go dig up a print book… when I’m sitting at my computer!

This project makes worlds more sense as a Web project, where to investigate a blog I need only click a link. The trouble there, of course, is finding someone to pay for your work… but you’ve had that trouble already with the print books, no? Perhaps sponsorship might have been more readily available had the end-product been of more immediate utility.

Balanced Libraries was a book, it makes sense as a book, it works fine as a book. The blog books needed not to be books, even ebooks. (What good would they have been on a Kindle? Not much.)