Just Received My Book: Some Thoughts
I just received my long-awaited photo book of a recent trip to Africa. The book was uploaded via Booksmart v 1.9 back on 10/15/07 and apparently was shipped from Seattle on 10/20. I’m not sure why it took 9 days to reach me here in Virginia, but so be it. This was my first book published with Blurb and here are my thoughts/opinions: 1. Shipping takes too long. 2. The photographs are "dull" in color. Not even close to what I had achieved in Photoshop. Everything is much darker than what I had expected. 3. The paper quality is very poor and feels "cheap". An option to pay a bit more and get a higher quality paper would be welcomed. 4. The book was not packaged well at all. It was shrink-wrapped and then put into a box. No bubble wrap, no foam peanuts, no cushioning at all. So of course, one of the corners was slightly dented. Not a huge deal, but if I’m paying over $70 for a book, I’d at least like it to arrive in pristine condition. 5. Make no mistake about it, these are definitely NOT bookstore quality books. They seem to be satisfactory, but they’re not top-quality by any stretch of the imagination. I may or may not publish another book with Blurb. It seems to me like they still have too many issues to put a lot of faith (and cash) into their product until they get their act together and fix some of these issues.
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I believe we’ve heard most of these facts (not opinions) before: (1) shipping isues, (2) paper quality. (3) poor packaging.
This is why I’ve held off publishing with Blurb. They either don’t care or can’t fix the problems.
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pearson32, Sorry about your experience with Blurb. My experience with the book quality has been just the opposite although I have read on the Forum complaints about books falling apart, etc, but that is not the rule and I think Blurb will fix those issues when brought to their attention by email. I guess the print quality let down has to do with expectations. I think Blurb’s claim to be bookstore quality seem to fit when comparing to books I’ve purchased from Borders, etc. For anyone reading this thread who have not used Blurb before, I’ve made this suggestion on several other threads. If you have not seen a Blurb book or one printed by LuLu, MyPublisher or Kodak Gallery for example purchase a copy of "How to Make Book" (www.blurb.com/bookstore/detail/33348). It is published by Blurb, is a hard cover and it will give you a look at Blurb quality for only $14.95+shipping and no work on your part. If you like the quality then go for it. Hate to see so many spending time creating a book that does not meet their expectations. (I don’t work for Blurb.)
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LOL, I had read other comments from people saying their photos were darker and duller, so I guess I overcompensated with mine, and made them much warmer and brighter and more saturated when I created the book. And what I got was exactly the way the pictures looked to me on my monitor – not darker or duller at all! My first blurb book shipped in days after I ordered it, and arrived quickly. I ordered my second on Oct. 21 and it still just shows as "processing". And it’s only a 40-page book, photos only. The 120-page book with photos and text shipped very promptly! Well at least I’m not in a rush for this book. I still love blurb.
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PSDesign: I beg to differ with you. These ARE opinions; they are my opinions that might be based on facts, but they’re opinions nonetheless. You might want to keep yours to yourself.
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I completely disagree with you. My book is beyond high quality.. color matches my screen and looks bookstore quality to me.. The only thing I didn’t dig was the barcode on the back..
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I too have just received a test book. Here are some thoughts: I did all my book design in InDesign and then went through the laborious task of generating jpegs and putting them in BookSmart. While I can understand Blurb wanting to make life easier for people who do not have book designer software, it is reinventing the wheel. I understand from reading this forum that PDF upload might be possible one day. Hopefully SOON! Very disappointing to find I can’t do a full cover design. I hope that is addressed soon too. Why can’t you have a spine width calculator like Lulu? Comments on barcodes – see my other posting. I wish you’d lose them! Logo: unobtrusive on the last page, although I again wish you’d just leave the branding off without resorting to charging more for, effectively, less ink! What does the Blurb branding accomplish? Nothing, other than being annoying. Word of mouth will gain you customers, not an obscure image on the last page. Sermon over… The shipping didn’t take long. Although I have extensive experience with Lulu, so I know shipping POD books can be very variable. On arrival it was well packed. On opening it I found some clot had spilt glue on the edge of the pages!! They were stuck together and I had to use a knife to cut them open. Not a good start. Printing is fairly good. For B&W reproduction and some solid colour areas not as good as Lulu. Not being an expert on the presses used I can only imagine that it’s a difference between the halftone of the Indigo and whatever the iGen3 uses. Certainly the black text was not as crisp as in Lulu’s books – lots of fuzzies around the edges of the letters. Paper seems good. Binding seems good – no pages fell out… indeed, I think I’d have a hard time yanking them out. The dust jacket cover was not so good. Unfortunately it has a nice curl to the top and bottom away from the book giving it a lip, so a little disappointing there. Here endeth my comments.
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I did a book that was mostly text. The few images came out better than expected so as a a very demanding photographer I was pleased. The quality of this first book was first class – I haven’t seen better ones in the bookstore. Yes, I’ve read lots of bad reviews on blurb photos, and on lulu’s for that matter, and other POD. But I’m working on a Photography book – so I’ll wait before commenting further. My only real complaint was that the book did not have any printing on the cover and spline, only on the jacket.
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PSDesign – just curious – you don’t publish with blurb – you only stay here to bash them? I’m surprised they allow you to post here. The worst two things about any internet forums are shills and trolls but we have to live with both. :)
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Anyone waiting for Blurb software to be perfected before publishing will have to wait a very long time. That is true of almost all software. Beta means beta- it’s a work in progress. I was very happy with the job Blurb did- and have said so elsewhere in these forums. It’s definitely worthwhile giving Blurb a spin…...K.
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“I did all my book design in InDesign and then went through the laborious task of generating jpegs and putting them in BookSmart… the black text was not as crisp as in Lulu’s books – lots of fuzzies around the edges of the letters.”
I suspect there’s a connection between these two statements. Normal text is rendered from vector fonts; yours was halftoned from a bitmap. It’s not surprising to see some fuzziness undr those circumstances.
I understand why you did what you did (InDesign to JPEG to BookSmart), and in fact I also used a full-page JPEG with text for the cover page of in my first book (in press)... but in my case the text was only a few words in large type, so I don’t anticipate problems.
Putting body text into JPEG format, however, is obviously not something one would prefer to do if there were any alternative. Let’s hope Blurb starts accepting PDFs soon!
Andy Baird
http://www.andybaird.com/travels/
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Andybaird: I transfered my PDF to Photoshop and created the JPEGs from there at maximum quality (and looking at them afterwards they show no artifacts, so the fuzzies aren’t jpeg artifacts). My test book included text with various fonts and point sizes to see what would happen. The only test I did not make was creating text in booksmart directly – do you think there would be a difference? Hmmm – not too keen on text being created by a Java program. One wonders how text is being rendered in the PDF (which I assume) BookSmart produces.
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cbnewwham,
As for your wondering about if PDF produced in BookSmart is done by itself, I believe it is done by “third party” PDF vendor called iText, I believe. If you look into your PDF property document on all kinds of tidbits, how it was produced, what font it is being used, and all that… that comes with PDF document. I don’t think that iText produce very high quality PDF files as what Adobe PDFs are designed for.
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I’m about to publish my first photo book and am investigating which service to use. I’ve just seen a Blurb book and was reasonably impressed. I’m a bit concerned about some of the negative comments but, as someone already pointed out, there are negative/positive comments about all of the companies. I have a question for those of you who have experienced problems with the colour of photos not matching those on your screen – are you using Mac or PC?
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My PC lcd monitor has never been calibrated by spider – I just did the rough calibration that can be done for free. However, I found, as I did with Lulu, that the pictures came out close to what was on screen. My test book had a range of colour and B&W samples and they all came out fine – no surprises at all. Even the B&Ws came out fairly close to neutral. My only concerns are the barcode issue and the warped dust-jacket issue (see above). I’ll ignore the glue being on the book pages – unless it happens again.
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“looking at them afterwards they show no artifacts, so the fuzzies aren’t jpeg artifacts”
I didn’t say they were; I said the problem most likely was halftoning. You’re looking at millions of colors on your monitor, but Blurb is printing with just four colors: cyan, magenta, yellow and black. To get from millions to four, they use halftone screens—four of them, at carefully calculated angles relative to each other.
Given this process, minute jaggies in text are almost inevitable, even with fine screens. (Anybody know how many LPI they’re using?) But as I understand it, text created directly in BookSmart is rendered from vector fonts directly to the printer, so no halftoning occurs. The result should be cleaner looking text.
I say “should be” because I have yet to receive my first Blurb book. :-) But this is all pretty standard stuff in the printing industry, and I do have experience with that… so I doubt I’m far off in saying that the reason your text is fuzzy is most likely that it’s being printed as four-color halftones rather than as RIP’d vector characters. Try creating text in BookSmart next time and see what it looks like.
I don’t mean to sound unsympathetic; in fact, I’d much rather be using InDesign myself, and I’ve been tempted to employ the same JPEG-export workaround that you did to get past some of BookSmart’s limitations. But I’m realistic about the price I’ll pay if I choose to put all my text in bitmap form and get it halftoned; that’s just the way process printing works.
Andy Baird
http://www.andybaird.com/travels/
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Andy, I believe Blurb uses 300dpi and probably a super pixel approach to half toning and as you said text will be printed with CMYK and even with black text the rendering in an application like InDesign going through a JPEG converstion will not render the black text as just K.
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i remember reading somewhere that the screens used are 175 LPI
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