Review: Blurb Books
Friday, March 28, 2008
Over a year ago I wrote a scathing review on MyPublisher.com. My feelings have not subsided on that point. However, my ambition to try out different photobook services dried up for some reason. Like other time-consuming hobbies such as scrapbooking, this activity just didn’t take well with working full time and keeping up with a dozen TV shows. So.
Nonetheless, I have taken the opportunity to try out another company when the opportunity presented itself. And since my former college roommate got married last summer and had both a wedding shower and bachelorette party, resulting in many photos, I decided to use Blurb to make her a gift photobook.
Why Blurb? Its website is really nice, and it has a self-publishing emphasis. That is, once you make a book, you can put a price on it and sell it to your friends or the public. There is also a community on Flickr dedicated to Blurb. It’s not limited only to photobooks, either. Once you think of it as a self-publishing tool, the possibilities are endless. You can publish your portfolio, your blog, recipes, poetry, or children’s stories.
Similar to MyPublisher and its BookMaker software, you put together your Blurb book using proprietary software called BookSmart. It was pretty intuitive and easy to download and use. It loaded rather slowly on my computer, perhaps due to the size of my images. I made a 7×7 inch hardcover book, and I found that the software wasn’t that good at centering the images to focus on the important points. I had to go in and manually adjust the photos so that people’s heads weren’t cut off. The look I was going for was full-bleed images (or as close to full-bleed as possible), and the software did a pretty good job of showing off my photos without distortion.
If you don’t want only one photo per page, there are different layouts available depending on the number of photos you want on the page, up to 12 collage-style or set off from each other individually. I think MyPublisher’s software has more variety of layouts depending on number of photos. You’ll notice a lack of scrapbook-type layouts and elements, such as crooked alignments and flowery backgrounds. This is a company geared toward artists and writers.
Shipping costs can be onerous with Blurb, which calculates shipping individually by the details of your order. My 20 page 7×7 inch hardcover book costed $8.26 to ship to Pasadena, California at the slowest speed, UPS ground. My book costed $22.95 to begin with. If you buy in bulk, like at least 10 copies, you get a 10 percent volume discount on the cost of the books.
I think making a wedding photobook with Blurb might have been neat if it turned out professional-looking and wedding guests could order online, making things easier on me. But honestly, who would want to spend $30+ dollars on a photobook of someone else’s wedding? If I were going to give someone a photobook, I wouldn’t want them to pay for it.
Below are some shots of my Blurb book before I gave it away. Let me just say off the bat that I am disappointed with the print quality of photobook services in general. I’ve seen my friends’ Snapfish and Shutterfly calendars and photobooks, and none of them rise up to the quality of the cheapest thing imaginable – a Costco print. The main draw of photobook services is their convenience and the novelty of having your photos in book form and their uniqueness as gifts, not the sterling photo quality.
That said, I was blown away by the cover of the Blurb book. The inside print quality was whatevers, but the glossy, vibrant and professional cover was very impressive. The two inside flaps are perfect for inserting personal messages. This sets Blurb apart from other photobook companies. You can even print your own title on the spine of the book – how much more book-like can you get?
The cover:
The cover spread out:
Inside:
As you can see, the cover is great but the photos are less than sharp. There’s always a flatness or dullness to the printing. The inferior quality, I’m told by an insider of the photobook industry, is due to the use of Indigo printers, which are an advanced type of inkjet printers designed to print double-sided pages rapidly and economically, so that companies can sell books at a reasonable price to consumers and ship them quickly. The speed needed for a quick turnaround is and was crucial to the photobook industry’s success, but it is also what compromises the quality you’d see in prints from Costco, Kodak, or Target.
Would I use Blurb again? The jury’s still out. I need to try the other services. I’ve got my eye on Picaboo, Shutterly, Snapfish, and SharedInk. (But that glossy cover…that’s hard to beat.)