Monday, October 13, 2008

Blurb photo books

After seeing an advert for Bob Books on the side of a bus here in Edinburgh, I was interested in seeing how good these photo book companies actually are, I thought I could maybe get a book made with photos from my holidays. Bob Books seemed pretty expensive, but then I found Blurb, they are slightly cheaper than many of the others (80 page 7" square book is about £18 delivered).

I downloaded their software (Windows/Mac only) and Rosie and I set about creating our book. The software lets you drag photos onto pages and do some fancy layout (e.g. a mosaic of 4 photos, one big photos with a smaller insert). These layouts are both a good thing in that they are more imaginative than my uncreative brain would have come up with, but also a bad thing in that sometimes you want something slightly different from the way they do it, but you can't change it. This means that if you want to make a page any of the 100 odd ways that Blurb let you, you can, but if you want to stray from this, you're stuck. While this wasn't a huge problem for me, I can see that it might be more infuriating for someone who wanted more control over their book.

Anyway, we add about 54 pages of photos, put in all our captions and text and uploaded it to Blurb. After paying and choosing the cheapest shipping it was a matter of sitting back and waiting. A week later, we got a parcel through the door (it's worth mentioning shipping to the UK came from The Netherlands, I was a bit worried about getting stung on customs charges since Blurb seemed to be an American company, but if they ship from within the EU it should be OK).

The book is pretty impressive, it looks almost exactly like how I imagined, the dust jacket is nice and glossy and the pages are laid out as shown in the software. It has a look and feel of a "real" book. The only downside is that the 7" square book is a bit smaller in real life than I had imagined, but to be fair it is exactly the size Blurb said it would be.

Overall, I would recommend Blurb to anyone looking to make a Photo book of their own, as long as they aren't too concerned with having absolute control over the layout on every page and are happy enough to go with Blurb's templates.

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