Dice Word List book

I just finished a book project. It’s called the Dice Word List book.

The book’s website explains what it’s useful for, so I won’t repeat it all here.

This has been a perfect-for-Joel hobby project. It involved making a book; moreover making a book by writing code that I could re-use in later projects. It was a book that some people might find useful and that somehow didn’t exist yet. It was something that could be produced and sold quickly, with few up-front expenses. And it was an opportunity to make progress on some very old experiments of mine in a way that might turn a tiny profit.

Producing this book was a middle element somewhere inside my endless matryoshka doll of automated book-making; there were further projects inside it, which I describe in more technical detail in this post at The Notepad. Most importantly, I was able to write and publish a scripting library called bookcover, which gives me a way to create print-ready book covers programmatically, rather than by clicking around in a graphics editor. When I start publishing more websites as books, I’ll be able to do clever things with the covers of those books that I would never have had the patience to do manually.