My Publisher
My Publisher seems like a great site to use, I found out about it today. The software isn’t slow and doesn’t crash like booksmart which means you can actually make and edit a book in a timely fashion. The site design and ease of use are great, it has testimonials from satisfied customers including professional photographers, and has a satisfaction guarantee if you’re not completely satisfied with print quality.
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Sounds like they wrote the post for you. I checked out their forums, and they have most of the same issues as here, except they don’t seem to have any shills from Blurb on their site.
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I too checked them out, prior to my using Blurb and BookSmart, but just to be fair, I re-checked them out after seeing this post. They’re considerably more expensive, their hard-cover (without dust jacket) has a big hole in the middle of it, and it’s not optional, and if you do want a hard cover with a dust jacket instead of the hole, it costs extra. And as far as their forums go, I glanced in there, saw very little activity and almost no community atmosphere at all… BookSmart and Blurb may not be perfect, but I’ll be staying here for a while yet…
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So far.. I’m starting to feel pretty good about blurb in general. All that hinges on whether or not my first order prints quickly, correctly, and with reasonable quality. But the response of the blurb team seems pretty good, the software is pretty cool and actually worked well overall for me, and the community here seems very responsive and helpful. I’ll just have to limit my readings of the problem books… though I want to try an avoid the common pitfalls and see what the solutions are when problems arise. If 1.8 is this cool…. can’t wait for 1.9 and hoping for even more functionality. I’ve only done one 20page 7×7 so far, but the program worked pretty well on my Mac. Wondering if the problems arise with longer projects?
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Ok… downloaded My Publisher. And honestly.. I like Booksmart MUCH better. You can also resize a photo and position it wherever you want it on the page in booksmart.. I just checked. Booksmart has MANY more options for layout than MP.. though it’d really be cool if you could move text around on the page. Booksmart lets you generate a preview to print yourself or print to pdf on the Mac. MP doesn’t appear to let you do anything other than order a book. The ONLY thing I liked about MP better than Booksmart was the auto zoom-in when you’re editing. That was nice and worked quickly. Other than that… BookSmart WINS hands down in my "book". (pun intended) ;-) Can’t wait to see the new features in BookSmart 1.9. At the moment, I’m glad I went with BookSmart instead.
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If you could output a pdf from BookSmart without blurb watermarks… and move text around freely.. it’d be nearly perfect.
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skiphunt, I think the issue is that Blurb copyright their software including the page layout. If a PFD was supplied you could have that printed any where by anyone. Not good for the business model. Same reason pro. photographers would sell you the prints but not their negatives. (Sorry for that analogy I’m and old analog guy). They might be able to protect the PFD file to prevent printing but that would not help us users or having printing only at a low resolution would not be much better than the watermarks. May be I’m wrong and they will make that option available at sometime in the future. Importing a PFD file into blurb would be more useful to me.
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Yes, I understand their business model. The reason I’m asking is that I like their software so much… I want to use it to publish web-delivered ezines. Not for print. A low-res NOT print quality pdf is plenty good enough for web delivery. Hell, I’d likely even pay a fair price for a version of BookSmart that allowed me to do that. But, I think it would benefit Blurb/BookSmart more if they allowed a non-watermarked non-print quality pdf version. This would mean MANY more pdfs floating around the net… ALL with blurb’s logo at the end.. thus bringing in more publishers. I my opinion, letting users output a lowrez, web-friendly pdf version, but with the blurb logo in the back for online distribution would be an excellent business decision.
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You have a good idea there. Had not thought of that, as I said I’m still stuck in analog.
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At this time I am all in favour of Booksmart after spending days trying to get Mypublisher to work correctly. After initially working on a MAC version and transferring to PC – needless to say after no helpful repsonse I gave up. I of course, will reserve complete judgement until I see the finished product which I hope looks as good as it does on the preview.
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