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.)
| Tags: photobooks
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):
- SharedInk – best and most faithful color reproduction
- Shutterfly – some color saturation
- Picaboo
- Blurb – after you make your book, they make it available for sale
- Photoworks
- KodakGallery – purely online, slow and hard to use, poor layout selection
- Creative Memories
- Book It
- iPhoto (Mac-only) – stylish, good fonts, has the most editing options, auto spell check, no large book option
- Unibind
- Lulu
- Tabblo
- Snapfish
- QOOP + flickr
- SnapJot – collaborative digital scrapbooking
- WeddingAlbumsandMore – build your own wedding album
- ImageLoop – Germany-based index site linking to even more photo sites I’ve never heard of
- (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.
| Tags: photobooks, eye candy, obsessions