Books can make great gifts, but probably not this one (a first 7x7 book review)
We received our book today, 200 pages, a 7×7 review of the first 18 months of the life and times of our twin daughters. This was the proof copy, to make sure that we liked everything before we ordered three more for Christmas gifts and a couple to put away for our girls when they were older. We are not satisfied with the product and will not be ordering more of this book. My wife is a librarian and I worked in bookstores for years to get myself through school, and neither of us thinks that this is a "bookstore quality" book. I will say that on first glance the book looks great. The dust jacket is folded a little strange, the images don’t line up with the creases, but whatever. After paging through it for a while, though, we’ve found some faults we can’t live with. 1. The print quality. Our book has the same four color artifacts discussed in this thread, quite similar to the examples shown in this thread. As with these other book makers, we do not like the quality. Bruce from Blurb says in one of these other threads that it is because the 7×7 format is done "with a toner process" rather than the same printer as the larger books. I ask here, how is anyone supposed to know about that? The "How to make a book" book from Blurb is printed in the 8×10 format, so even if we had bought one, we would be expecting a different product. There are no FAQs discussing the issue. The only way you would find out about it is by actually buying one and being disappointed or digging exhaustively through the forum before ever starting a project. 2. The crop. I expected to lose 1/8 inch off the edges. I did not expect to lose a few microns off the top and a 1/4 inch off the bottom. Because of the way the book is cut none of the layouts are even top to bottom. 3. The back cover. The back cover is a professional portrait done against a white studio backdrop. The whiteness was blown out in Photoshop to get rid of any tones at all on the screen. When printed, there are blue blotches all over the place. 4. The binding. I’m okay with perfect binding, but it should be done squarely. When you hold the closed book edges toward you, and look at the spine, the bound pages make a diagonal – they’re out of square by 1/8 inch, at least. There are also a few faults we would let slide, as part of the production process, but they sure don’t help the situation. 5. As others have said before, the paper is just a hair thin. Be nice to have an option for something a little beefier. 6. As discussed elsewhere, the barcode is annoying. After all that, the quality is not so bad that the target audience (our daughters’ grandparents) would not be thrilled with the book. But we are pretty sure we can do better. We are going to re-do the whole thing and try Lulu and see if we like the results any better. We will also be re-printing a few highlights in a larger format from Blurb to see what it is like, but we will not be printing the whole 200 pages through Blurb, the cost would be too high. Blurb is still in Beta, according to the front page, which is why I’m bothering to be so detailed. Organizations need feedback to grow. And some of the Blurb operation has impressed us quite a bit. The Booksmart software is strong. Not perfect, but it does its job very well. The problem is, it raises the expectations very high. My wife and I think that the layout of the book, and the way it translated from software to page is great, we couldn’t be more pleased with that. But the execution in turning design into printed product has left us wanting more. Unless the other avenues we try fail utterly, we probably won’t be printing any more books with Blurb any time soon. In a year or two I’ll come back to the forum and see what people are saying about Booksmart 2.3 and what sort of printing problems folks are seeing, and maybe we’ll give it another try. Best of luck to you, Blurb! It truly is a good idea you have, I hope you can work the kinks out of the fulfilment side. Steve
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