Lost in Space
It has been considered, but the amount of labor involved in reformatting even a tiny fraction of our articles for print is something nobody seems willing to take on.
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"
Blapper of Water
Another challenge would be just, y'know, the content of the site being more or less "made by committee," and so even long-standing articles would need revision to make everything coherent with the purpose of such a book. There are a lot of TVT-specific in-jokes and even fan-specific in-jokes that would need revision, and tropers have a tendency of potholing incoherently (to a book-reader's eye anyway). Another significant problem for an editor would be the use of trope names in descriptions, which is usually fine in a website as there are links that users can utilize to get a trope's definition — but book-readers cannot do that.
tl;dr: Websites and books are read in fundamentally different ways, and so they are written in different ways. An editor (or team of editors) would have to edit every article to ensure ease-of-reading.
The formatting problem is, I'm sure, a behemoth in its own right, but it sounds like the 2.0 proposal would make that easier. If there's a way to separate the description sections from the example sections with a click of the button — and a way to copy-paste a trope's description along with its title — it wouldn't be too difficult (obviously we're talking about someone being paid for that work 'cause it still sounds like a lot of work).
Though I am curious about how such a book might be organized. I'm sure it would include various Tropes Of Legend and maybe even some Trope Overdosed works (since TV Tropes articles are copyrighted to TV Tropes).
Edited by WaterBlap on Nov 22nd 2018 at 9:03:27 AM
Look at all that shiny stuff ain't they pretty
Tyrannoraptoran Reptiliomorph
There are plenty of book versions of websites, including The Other Wiki. Yes, I know we're not them, but the idea came to me and I realised I had never seen anyone propose it.
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Not necessarily the entire site in one book - each book could have one or a few articles in it, or something.
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