MikeBrum.com

I received my book yesterday afternoon from blurb.com and I wanted to take a bit to talk about it (and people wanted to hear about my impression of the service).

First, when I went to get a book printed, I first tried mypublisher.com. In my experience, the software was simply horrible. Well, maybe that’s putting it strongly, but I didn’t like it. It seemed sloppy and lazy and there’s a bunch of room for improvement. I got fed up with it after about an hour of trying to get my layout to look the way I wanted it.

I then tried to use shutterfly. Their service is slightly different, in where you upload your photos to them and then build the book online. Unfortunately, after about an hour and 4 separate attempts, I couldn’t upload my photos. A few would make it and then the transfer would hang. I’d then have to kill the page and start from scratch. Totally not worth my time trying to play around with it.

It wasn’t until my 3rd shot that I tried blurb.com. As soon as I launched the software, I knew it was exactly what I had expected from mypublisher. They have a TON of templates and options for placing your photos and text – which is exactly how it should be.

As for the product, I’m rather happy with the results. The colors are all very bright and they look pretty close to what I was expecting to see given the photos that I submitted. I’m sure my monitor isn’t calibrated 100% perfectly – though I did give it a shot with Adobe Gamma before processing the images. If anything, some of the colors might be a tad darker, but only by a small degree (assuming that the issue isn’t with my monitor).

The dust cover looks really nice and came out exactly as I wanted. I was impressed that the text that I manually positioned came out exactly in the right spot and not “just close”. This tells me that the layout software that you use renders the previews very accurately – which is very important for anyone using it in any creative way.

I submitted the order (including all of the files and layout details) around 2:00am on 5/27. With 2nd day shipping, I received the book on 6/2. Including that Tuesday, that’s a 6 business day turn-around from order to receipt of product – which is very respectable IMO.

Everyone that I’ve shown it to has been very impressed with the results – including people that saw the images before publication. I’d definitely recommend blurb.com to anyone looking to make a book for themselves.