We remove the Beta banner and magically, PixxiBook enters full availability. Of course it was an open beta so it was already fully available but the banner was the last road-block, a warning that is no longer required.

Of course there are still some bugs out there, usability issues and the like but the book creation pipeline is solid and delivers a faithful impression of the blog as book.

Supported Blog Hosts (or CRMs)

Wordpress - of course. The most widespread CRM. Both wordpress.com and independent/self hosted are supported. With the huge range of Wordpress plugins and themes available there are no doubt some corner cases still to resolve but general compatibility is very good.

Blogger - the second blogging platform. Starting to look a little stale but the underpinnings are solid, reliable and well structure. Delivers well into PixxiBook.

SquareSpace - the rising contender. The modern variant (V7) is very well supported. V5 generally will not deliver all content. Luckily almost blogs of the last four years are on V7.

Delivery Times

We are still manually verifying every book as it goes through the printing pipeline. Delivery times are currently about 2 to 3 weeks. Delivery times affect us too as we strive to add features and verify samples. We are looking at how to improve these without adding costs.

Book Format Changes

Our initial samples are in PA4 format, approximately 210x280mm which is a kind of short A4 similar to the US 11x8.5in size. It’s a nice aspect ratio for a book. Unfortunately it looks like our printer is going to standardise on the slightly taller A4 210x297mm. We’ll have to see whether we stick to PA4 or retool to A4. The aspect ratio is less aesthetic (in my humble opinion) but the pages are bigger which is nice so the nett effect may be positive. New samples will tell.