Monday, October 02, 2006
Blurb, the Cafe Press of On Demand Book Publishing
Blurb is an online on demand book publishing service. You download their free Blurb BookSmart software to organize to layout your photos and text content for your personal book.
A number of predefined templates gives you a quick jumpstart to creating a cook book, poetry book, blog book plus baby book, dog book and cat book premade styles.
The Blurb book making software is available for both PC and Mac and allows you to customize your photos, add design effects and enter your text.
The finished books on the Blurb site look high quality and professionally printed but come only in 10x8 portrait or 8x10 landscape format.
The printed books are on heavyweight, archival paper stock ideal for photos and text come in bound hardcover with a custom dust jacket. Blurb plans on including softcover binding in the future.
The book prices are reasonably priced at around $29.95-$37.95 US for hardcover books 20-120 pages. The Blurb book service is only available in Canada and the USA at the moment. Quantity discounts on orders of 25+; custom quotes on 400+. Books are expandable up to 440 pages and no limit on number and size of photos.
Blurb even lets you sell your finished books online on their site. There are plenty of useful ideas for this service. Say you live in a city like Paris and take night photos, now you can print a book of your photos and sell them without shopping for a publisher and test market your book with small runs on Blurb.
Or you are part of a fundraiser or large family gathering, publish your souvenir book after the event and allow people from all over North America to order it. You no longer have to solicit money from everyone for small book runs.
Pricing and shipping details here.
Another interesting idea at Blurb’s service they are beta testing is automatically turning TypePad blogs into books. Yes, automatically! From their site “Our new Blog Slurper lets bloggers choose how they want their blog slurped – by date or topic – and whether to include images, comments, and links. Our BookSmart app then inserts the slurped blog directly into a professionally designed book template, producing a draft book in minutes. Say goodbye to copying and pasting. Support for additional blog apps including Moveable Type, Blogger, and WordPress will follow, incorporating feedback from this first beta release.”
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