Blurb: The Latest Word in Desktop Publishing
11:20 pm, January 20th, 2009, Lonnie Lazar
Have you ever designed and ordered a book using Apple’s iPhoto book publishing tool? I have, and they are nice. The quality is quite good and the pricing seems fair value – they make great commemorative gifts and keepsakes. But Apple’s not really in the publishing business. Through iPhoto your options are somewhat limited and somewhat photo-centric, all of which is as it should be.
But say you’ve got a publishing idea that doesn’t fit one of Apple’s iPhoto templates and, well, gosh darn it, also doesn’t seem to be getting much interest from any of the few publishers remaining in the business of making and distributing books. There’s always the so-called “vanity press” – but what if you could just design it and print it on your own?
Well, you can. With free software from Blurb you can write, design and print your own books and sell them online. Books can be up to 440 pages long and come in a variety of sizes in both hardback and softcover, at prices that make you wonder why it’s so hard to make money in the publishing business.
Blurb’s BookSmart software for Mac (cross-platform compatible with Windows) features a ton of professionally designed layouts or lets you create from scratch, integrates seamlessly with iPhoto, lets you import from online sources such as Flickr and Picasa, and supports all of your own fonts in a variety of sizes and text styles.
When you’re done creating, you can sell your masterpiece online in the Blurb Bookstore and keep 100% of the markup.
Blurb may not save the publishing industry the way iTunes saved the music industry, but it’s nice to know you can be a Paperback Writer for just $4.95.
Posted by Lonnie Lazar in First impressions, Media, News, Software | Comment on this article
Wow, wake up and smell the self-published coffee, CoM!
Blurb’s been around for several years now and I’ve used them for quite a few personal photobooks. Their software is simply fantastic, highly flexible, customisable, and easy to use, and the online component of the process is also very slick. However, I have to say I don’t recommend them to my friends any more as I’m afraid in my experience the great value prices on their site were reflected (in my case) by the long term (and in some cases short term, as in from the moment I opened it) poor quality of the construction.
Although in fairness I’ve not used them in the last 6 months so a lot could have changed, their bindings in books that are over a few hundred pages in length, especially hard-backed books, are simply awful. They are all glued, never stitched, and the glue is the kind that cracks and breaks after being opened and shut a few times. I had hardbacked books of around 300 pages arrive in that condition, with chunks of pages glued in wonky or even already falling out. Different reprints of the same hardbacked book with soft cover sleeve (sent by Blurb to replace poor quality copies) arrived displaying significantly different tones of magenta in the colours of said sleeve. Blurb acknowledged this as differences in the printing process from printer to printer, depending on where my book ended up being sent to for production.
In the end the only satisfactory product I had from them was a series of sub-100 page softback books. They hold together well and haven’t shown signs of peeling covers or cracking glue, but then they’re not flicked through that much.
To be fair to Blurb they were absolutely swamped with complaints from European customers (where the bulk of the problem seemed to be) and they were apparently tackling it head on at their European printers, but I’d still be extremely wary allowing books to go straight to a customer from Blurb which is a real shame as the software is absolutely wonderful, as is the ordering experience itself. And when the books are glued correctly, they look great!
owen-b, on January 21st, 2009 at 2:30 am
[...] http://cultofmac.com/blurb-the-latest-word-in-desktop-publishing/7301 [...]
Communication Technology Watch » Self Publishing Online with Blub, on January 21st, 2009 at 7:24 am
“at prices that make you wonder why it’s so hard to make money in the publishing business.”
What costs so much for the publishing business is finding something worthwhile to publish. Worthwhile as in, making us a profit after paying everyone it takes to find worthwhile stuff and the overhead that goes along with having those people.
The actual printing is the easy part.
OlsonBW, on January 21st, 2009 at 8:08 am