Blurb * Lulu
As commercial book publishing crashes, personal book publishing is booming. Personal book making entails printing high-quality books in very small quantities, including quantities of one. New technologies permit anyone to print one copy of a softcover or hardcover book, including all-color photo books. These printed-on-demand books are indistinguishable from commercially printed books. In fact, some of the books you buy on Amazon are manufactured with this same technology. You just can't tell the difference.
However, being able to print as few as one copy -- instead of a minimum of a thousand -- shifts the economics of bookmaking toward individuals with more passion than money. For the past two years I've been producing high-quality books in very small quantities using several different services. I've shown these finished books around to many people, including those in the New York publishing industry and media, and everyone has agreed the quality is first class. Several of the photo books I've made look like coffee-table artworks, and cost about the same, yet I can produce them one by one on demand. I've also made text only books which appear to be store-bought trade paperbacks or hardcover books from the bookstore.
Having tried most of the services available and created dozens of books, I'm ready to recommend the best services to use. My advice is slightly complicated, because the success of book making and book publishing pivots around your aims.
To turn a text manuscript into a regular book, either softcover or hard, I recommend Lulu. Their website has a very thorough step-by-step process which will enable you to make a book with the least amount of money. A 100-page trade softcover book in black and white will cost about $7 to print. Lulu will walk you through the edit, design, and production sequence. They offer templates you can follow. Once in digital form, you can easily order one book or many. Lulu will also offer help in getting your book out into the world, but it can't really help you market or sell it. That will be your job as a self-publisher. If you are a more sophisticated book maker with your own design skills you can send Lulu a PDF file of your designed book, and simply have them print it, at the same prices. This is the way I use them. Finally, Lulu can also print full color books, including smaller full-color paperbacks. (These could run $20-30 a piece for 150 pages) The overall process of getting a book printed is smooth and fairly hassle free.
My recommendation for the best personal color book printer is Blurb. Blurb produces color books very similar to the iPhoto books you can order from Apple. Using iPhoto Books is slightly easier than using Blurb's software, particularly if all your photos happen to already be in iPhoto, but it works well enough. The idea is that you can drag images (photos or illustrations) into template book pages, add text or captions where you want to, then hit a button and have the finished book mailed to you. (all these systems work with PCs and Macs)
A few of the books I've made in copies of one.
The results from both Apple and Blurb are marvelous. In fact, these books are astounding. That's because they both use the same back-room engine, the HP Indigo 5000 (as do the other color book makers like Snapfish and MyPublisher). The Indigio is essentially a high-speed, high-quality liquid-toner printer that will print your photo book several pages across. (Lulu on the other hand uses a dry toner process called iGen3 from Xerox) The final result of a Indigo-printed page is a very richly colored, very finely detailed image. It looks like a page from a color magazine. The color-match is pretty close to the image you see on your monitor, with this exception: I've notice that printing on paper is far less forgiving of blurred or out of focus images. The human eye notices less-than-perfect sharpness on the page more than on the screen, so you have to be far more ruthless in your editing when making a book.
While Apple and Blurb both produce lovely printed books with well-crafted covers (in quantities of one), Blurb does it for a lot less money. A 100-page book of photographs will cost $100 with Apple iPhoto Books, but only $39 with Blurb. They are currently printed on the same machines. Blurb also offers more options for working directly from PDFs. Recently they announced an easy way to make a printed book version of your blog (or any part of your blog) which I have not tried yet, but will soon. Apple actually subcontracts their bookmaking to MyPublisher, so this is not their focus. Blurb, however, besides having the best prices, is the most dedicated to servicing the widening long-tail of personal book making.
For instance Blurb has noticed that while most people start out by ordering one copy of a personal book, they quickly come back for more. Ordering 50 or more copies is not uncommon. Furthermore, once people discover how easy it is to make a book, they make a lot of them. Maybe several a year. A book has an authority and weight that is not easily dismissed in this digital world. For instance, some people have discovered that by mailing out very nice books out of their reports, business plans, or even Powerpoint presentations they got more attention and calls back because "people won't throw a book out!"
I've also played around with different sized books. MyPublisher offers a truly coffee-table size photobook ($60) that is very impressive. I filled it with snapshots from a trip to Italy we made one year. At the other end of scale, I've made a number of itsy-bitsy books the size of a deck of cards with Apple iPhoto and MyPublisher books. I was first handed one of these diminutive works by a photographer who was using this cute booklet as her portfolio. Cool. I've made little ones this size devoted to curious themes just to hand out.
There are tons of reasons why people make personal books. Artists can use a clean trim hardcover book as their portable gallery. Cookbooks take on a higher class production when you can add photos of your dishes. I even saw one Blurb-produced book that was a reproduction of a relative's old typewritten manuscript of poetry. It had a lot of soul. Several friends who were scrapbook enthusiasts decided to switch to classy photobooks (everything is scanned first) when they saw the tidy fit-and-finish of the Blurb books. Photobooks are hot mementos for reunions. We now make a photobook from all our vacations. I attended one hi-tech conference recently at which everyone got an instant Indigo-produced color book summarizing the conference, pictures and all. At some of the foundations I am involved in, we've used hard cover color books of a fun meeting or trip as perfect gifts for potential funders. And nowadays Blurb books are inexpensive enough that some high school kids are making their own full-color alternative anti-yearbooks.
Most information in the world today is digital and has no need to ever leave the screen. But the more personal your expression is, and the more personal the audience, the greater the impact you get by making the information tangible. For making text in black and white, use Lulu. For making color pages, use Blurb. Lulu has great online tutorials, and Blurb has released a meta-book, a book which tells you how to make a book. It's quite well done, with solid advice useful no matter where you get it printed. While you can purchase a Blurb-made hard copy of this book, they also wisely offer a free downloadable PDF version.
-- KK
Lulu Paperback
$4.50 base price
Available from Lulu
Blurb Photobook
$19 base price
Available from Blurb
Blurb's How to Make a Book
Favorite (15)
Jasmin
You should check out SmileBooks.com. I just received a book from them and I am really impressed by the quality. Their software is great too. It is very flexible and easy to use. If you use the assistant you get a great book within minutes. Once the assistant did the prep work you can go through the pages and change whatever you want. You can fully customize the cover and the plage layouts. I found a 30 % discount voucher on their Facebook fan site (http://www.facebook.com/home.php#/pages/SmileBooks/42040218000?ref=ts). The voucher code is "SB30".
Niyoka
Would I be able to publish a children's book using JPEG images and not photos on Blurb or Smile Books? I am trying very hard to publish two of my illustrated children's books and there are so many options. I am having a hard time figuring out what is best for me?
Kevin Kelly
Yes, you can import "whole-page" jpegs for pages. In fact, this is the only way to do design outside of Blurb's software.
Margaux
I am trying to figure out what photo-book is easiest to use and produces best quality photos for my wedding album. I'm really torn between blurb and MyPublisher, and was wondering if you could elaborate on the differences between the two, or if you think another site is better. I am sadly a PC user, otherwise I'd use the Apple Photo Book since it seems the most consistently high quality that I've researched so far. Any help would be greatly appreciated!
Lisa Nielsen
This is a well-written informative post. I am doing a little research for a post I am creating about self-publishing for educators and I will definitely reference this.
Lisa Nielsen-The Innovative Educator
Read my blog about educating innovatively at
http://theinnovativeeducator.blogspot.com
Alfredo
Thanks for this post!
I've just received my first blurb book, and must say quality is SO GOOD!!!!
I did a full preview of the book in this video:
http://www.revver.com/video/1276039/a-video-about-a-book-about-sardinia/
kathryn
How does black and white print in blurb?
Peter
The only downside I have found with Blurb is their insistance that anyone who wants to buy a book from them must became a "member." This has discouraged several of my potential buyers. Blurb states that this is necessary in order for them to be able to report tracking information, only, but my buyers were leary of solicitations and unwanted e-mail that would result from his practice.
Donna
Thank you for the informative review and recommendation of Blurb. Do you know if the books are archival quality? Also, how long does Blurb keep the books in file in case a reprint is desired? Finally, I am also interested in what you think of the quality of photo books from SmileBooks.com.
Jennifer Harrod
Thanks for this post & comments.
I want to make a scrapbook, but I have lots of text in a word processor I want to be able to import in. I haven't found a program yet that makes this possible. I am having technical difficulties downloading Blurb.
Is the photo quality of Lulu acceptable? I'm not an artist, but I want my pics to look good. Thanks for any ideas!
Adam Parker
Great post, thanks for the helpful write up. I use blurb and love them. I may try some others in the future, but just ordered 4 more prints of my book and one will be on the new premium paper. As soon as I get the premium book in, I'll review the quality.
As for the blurb book, there were a few small issues, but the price is hard to beat and quality is overall amazing. You can see some more pictures here:
http://www.4tay.com/blogs/Adam_Parker/Blurb_Italy_book_has_arrived/1/1/692/
Thanks again for sharing and I hope everyone else continues to get good quality from blurb.
Daniel Silva
Excellent article, we are trying to pick a company to print a book that will be used as a sample portfolio (we are a graphic and web design company in Miami), my main problem is to print the screen shots of the websites we've done, has anyone here used either company to print screen shots? I know the logos, brochures, stationary and others will come out perfect... any comments are welcome.
you can see our portfolio here:
http://www.silvaheeren.com
Thanks for your help,
Daniel
silvaheeren.com
Kevin Kelly
I've printed screen shots in both Blurb books and Lulu books and they come out fine -- what you seen on your screen if they are at least 300 dpi.
sandy
While I agree that their quality is amazing......Be really, really careful with Blurb... I ordered books December 5, 2008 and they still did not arrive until after Christmas... Not only that, but they have NO PHONE NUMBER for you to call. This can be really, really stressfull if you have a deadline. I supposed that that would be ok if they responded to emails in a timely fashion, but they don't. This has happend two years in a row. Lesson: Order months in advance of your deadline or use a different publisher.
Kevin Kelly
@ sandy: Sorry to hear that. I did a holiday book this year with Blurb (as I do every year) but I ordered at Thanksgiving so I had no problem at all with delivery. They arrived within one week.
sandy
This is what I got December 18 -- 13 days after placing my order: Dear Blurbarian, Due to the volume of orders we're printing for the holidays, we're experiencing slight production delays of a few days, and wanted to let you know that it has taken longer than expected to process your order(s). We're working around the clock on getting your order to you as soon as possible and expect your order to deliver on or before Wednesday, December 24. No need to contact us, because we can't give you any more info at this time.
No need to contact them? You can't even if you wanted to. What a joke.
Kirsten
I have a book that was printed by Blurb and I am not at all impressed by the quality. The registration of the photos is off and the flyleaf is wrinkled. But I do wonder if this is a problem common with all these kind of sites. What kind of quality control can they offer for these prices?
WillC
I have just tried Blurb for the first time. I had two books printed. Both were printed and sent within days of being ordered. One of the books came in wrong there was another persons book bound to mine with the separation page and print info. Thank God it was not too personal. I did email Blurb and had a reply from them in an hour, along with return label etc. The reprint of only my book, I hope, is on its way. I do have one problem though with the printing and that is the quality of the pictures. They just don't seem as sharp and clear as they should be. The pictures are 6mb or higher. I am not talking about a picture taken from a cell phone. Otherwise I am very happy with Blurb and their resolution to the print problem.
Kevin Kelly
@ Kirsten: I've done a LOT of Blurb books and that hasn't been my experience at all. You should have them redo your books.
Davis
A warning to anyone considering using lulu.com's Photo Book Studio software (this is the web ap designed specifically for photo books as opposed to their general self publishing software which I've never used, but is evidently designed for print rather than photo-heavy projects):
I spent 5 or more hours setting up my project with the Photo Book Studio and was able to save and retrieve it over several sessions. When I logged in most recently though, all of my photos had disappeared from the project. Lulu tech support was able (several days later when they got around to my request) to make the photos reappear, but all my work laying out the pages and arranging the photos on them was lost. Lulu offered no explanation for this and said they were unable to help.
I will try again with another photo book operation (probably Blurb), but thought I'd share my experience to warn off anyone considering Lulu for their photo book project.
Deb
Does anyone have experience with Cafe Press? We want to publish a plain text poetry book.
HR
Try Viovio. They have more sizes and lower prices. I usually upload PDF's from iPhoto. Their new Designer is cool, though still in Beta
http://www.viovio.com/products/photo_books/
Gil
Hello,
We are trying to publish our book Making The Scene On Halloween. A concept of the book can be found at http://www.bigbendmagazine.com any ideas as to how we can accomplish this would be appreciated.
lola
thankyou for a very helpful review
i have a question....
i want to use blurb and have used their layout for a good looking photo book for travel photos...
my concern is that i've used black backgrounds for many of the pages, and in fact some of the photos are night shots with a lot of black in them...
is this large amount of black going to reproduce well in a book (with blurb printing)? or would i be better to use white backgrounds to be safe
(but the black looks so good!)
an opinion from someone who has used blurb before would be greatly appreciated!
with respect to unforgiving printing of unsharp images...
i think the important thing with these books is to get image size right before importing the images into the book layout program... i did a draft run of mine with small images then noted the optimal size for each image according to my layout, then redid it with optimally resized images... however, i haven't ordered my book yet! so i don't know what the results of that will be!!!
regards.
Kevin Kelly
@Iola: I've done Blurb books with black backgrounds on the pages with no problems.
wyrm11268
Great post, thanks! I have also had a book printed using Blurb. I did do a little research before hand and Blurb for me just seemed the easiest way to go. I have over 70 photo's in my book and that caused issues with some of the other companies.
The book looks great, I am so happy with it and as you say it looks just like a book you would get from Amazon.
If anyone wants to take a look at the end result of Dachshund Luke goes to Spain the first 15 pages can be seen here
http://www.blurb.com/my/book/detail/617064
thank you
jasont
Try bookemon.com, it provides two ways of making book (or mix of them): create from book template in choices trim sizes, or upload files in word/ppt/pdf to convert. All these making and publish can be done online. Have a try!
http://www.bookemon.com
christopher
Kevin, perhaps I didn't see this, but how did you manage colorspace issue to ensure proper profiling. Their instructions (just like Lulu and Mac Books) are typically to "leave in original space" and then "print the PDF we send you."
Color profiling is a bit more complicated than that, and I've always been reluctant to spend much time with these sites only to see color-shifts and other issues.
How did you resolve?
PS - LOVE your site. RSS feeds it to me like a drug ;-)
Kevin Kelly
@Christopher: You don't have much if any control over colorspace. It is not high end printing. There will be shifts. But its okay. If you can't live with shifts, then you might want to forgo this. Me, it's not a problem.
Dawn
I was not impressed with blurb's customer service. The first book I ordered from them came out fine; I was pleased with the quality but decided to make some changes to my layout. I uploaded the new book to the site a few months later and ordered two copies - only to receive the same book as before, without the changes I had made. When I contacted customer service, they told me I had to delete the old file before uploading the new one - nothing on the site had indicated this, and I assumed the new file, since it had the same file name, would automatically replace the old. I also thought the old file had expired since that is what they tell you happens if you do not have any orders on it within a certain time frame. They refused to take the books back or do anything about it because the error was technically mine. It's certainly their prerogative to run things that way, but given that my mistake was due to their site being uninformative and confusing on this matter, I think it wouldn't have hurt them to reprint two books. I will not be using them again.
Kevin Kelly
@Dawn, you'll find that renaming a file each time you make significant changes will save you a lot of trouble (not just with Blurb) but in any program, on any computer. I say this from experience. Backup, rename.
Danica
Great article, thank you. I've got a book at Blurb.com of which I've printed several copies and I'm thoroughly pleased with the quality. It's primarly a photobook and I've uploaded several different sizes (11x13 and 8x10). The Blurb software makes the layout a snap. One warning, if you want different sizes I'd recommend designing PDFs and uploading them that way. Blurb does not have a method of changing sizes; you'll have to start from scratch. If you've got PDFs you can resize them as needed. And you can try different vendors. If you design your book with proprietary software, you'll have to start over if you want to try a different POD.
I love the quality, pricing, and sizes available at Blurb but I'm going to try printing the book at Lulu for comparison. Blurb is great but Lulu has a better distribution strategy (Amazon and B&N).
https://www.setterlyyours.com