Beware of MyPublisher.com

Tuesday, December 26, 2006

I cried. This was supposed to be a great idea – unique, personalized photobooks as Christmas gifts to relatives who attended my wedding. Slick, commercially printed and bound books with endless possibilities. But when I procrastinated on this year’s gifts, I was stuck with the only photobook service I knew of at that time that was still taking orders – MyPublisher.

The result: A resoundingly bad experience. I ordered six 11.25” x 8.75” Classic Hardcover book for relatives, all featuring them, my husband and I in selected wedding photos. After paying an arm and a leg for fast shipping, the books arrived, and…were of the most disappointing print quality I could have imagined. (I’m not the only one.)

They looked like they were printed on a home inkjet. Photos printed at Costco from the same exact files looked much more professional. There were printer streaks, visible pixels, blurring, and distortion. I emailed customer service (because they don’t take phone calls) to complain, and they gave me coupon codes to redo the books and a huge list of specifications.

The specifications, which boggled my mind, recommended the resolution to be between 180 and 200 dpi (I used 300 dpi), and the megapixels to be between 2 and 7 mp (the photos were taken by a professional wedding photographer, so I assume they were above that). I’m no expert, but from years of printing digital photos, I never would have thought that having a higher resolution or megapixel setting would do any harm to the image. I thought it would only cause problems if I was under the ideal setting for the target image size.

I began to rebuild the books, which took hours due to the resizing and reuploading of the 100 photos I had carefully arranged in the preset layouts. And then, as I progressed through the book, which had several single-photo full-bleed pages, the BookMaker 2.0 software began to tell me that those pages were in danger of reproducing poorly because the resolution was too low. This did not happen with the original 300 dpi images.

At this point, I stopped working on the books and emailed MyPublisher again. I told them if I couldn’t have the full-bleed pages, I didn’t want to do the books at all. I said was frustrated that that complication only arose after I resized the photos to 200 dpi like they told me to. I said the books were meant as Christmas gifts but last-minute gifts would be all I could hope for. I asked for a full refund.

They emailed back a short reply, with no explanation whatsoever, simply saying “we’re sorry you feel that way” and agreeing to the refund (which will be processed in the next 2 weeks). I get to keep the books, but honestly I am embarrassed to give them to people as Christmas presents. They are simply not professional or presentable in my eyes (which, unfortunately, are extremely picky and perceptive).

So, though the BookMaker 2.0 software was pretty fun and easy to use, I’m never going back to MyPublisher. They are my first experience with online photobooks and from what I’ve read online, I know the experience can only get better. Don’t get me wrong – there are plenty of people who have had great experiences with MyPublisher. Maybe I was just unlucky. But I also have incredibly high standards for these kinds of things.

I think I will try out as many photobook services as I can afford and rank them. I’ve heard awesome things about SharedInk and Shutterfly. But there are so many services out there. Just a quick search has unearthed (with notes gleamed from reviews):

1. SharedInk – best and most faithful color reproduction
2. Shutterfly – some color saturation
3. Picaboo
4. Blurb – after you make your book, they make it available for sale
5. Photoworks
6. KodakGallery – purely online, slow and hard to use, poor layout selection
7. Creative Memories
8. Book It
9. iPhoto (Mac-only) – stylish, good fonts, has the most editing options, auto spell check, no large book option
10. Unibind
11. Lulu
12. Tabblo
13. Snapfish
14. QOOP + flickr
15. SnapJot – collaborative digital scrapbooking
16. WeddingAlbumsandMore – build your own wedding album
17. ImageLoop – Germany-based index site linking to even more photo sites I’ve never heard of
18. (And of course, the 5-year old “industry leader”) MyPublisher

This is insane! Type in “photobook.com” and it takes to a Denmark-based site. I thought scrapbook fever was big in the Midwest and Japan, but the over-photographed life seems to be the trend everywhere.

I want to figure out which service is best and most cost-effective for which purposes (gift, personal archive, scrapbook, etc.) – for the layperson. I’m not a professional graphic designer or photographer and don’t plan to become one. Yet, why am I so obsessive? Meticulosity.

Then again…there are professional photographers out there who have already tried many of these services and reviewed them. That should be the starting point of my research.

3 Comments  | Tags: photobooks, eye candy, obsessions