Trade book question/frustration
Hi,
I’ve been preparing a Trade-sized book in Word (with the Add-In). Planning to have black-and-white text & photos inside, and color photos on the front & back cover. I’d like a spine that says the title & author.
Everything I’ve seen in Blurb’s help pages so far says 80 pages is the magic dividing line between having a spine with text and not having a spine. However there’s some ambiguity: one help page says "you can add [a spine] to any book designed in BookSmart except for softcovers with fewer than 80 pages.” Another page says that spines with text appear "if you have more than 80 pages in your book, this applies to softcover spines as well." [So what about exactly 80?)
So I emailed customer support tonight with a description of my project to find out the absolute MINIMUM number of pages I need to get a spine, 80 or 81, and they replied "For this type of project, text will not print on the spine of a softcover book with less than 110 pages. "
So what exactly does it take to get a spine with text on a trade-sized book? And why does Blurb say "80" all over their web site if customer support tells me I need 110? And does it make a difference if I’m using Word with the Add-In instead of BookSmart? (Looks like I’ll be required to do the cover using a Blurb online tool, anyway.)
Thanks,
….Chuck
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Hi Chuck- Yes, depending on what creation tool you are using the spine text minimum page requirement will vary. With Word to Book it is 110 pages and with BookSmart it is 80 and above (PDF to Book does not have any limit). -Craig
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Test: thought I posted a long reply here yesterday but I don’t see it. Trying a short one.
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Trying again with the long post. Thanks Craig, although I’m still confused about one thing you wrote. You say that "PDF to Book does not have any limit" but to me that implies you could have a 2 page book or a 1000 page book and it doesn’t affect text on a spine, because there’s "no limit." Surely there’s some finite number, below which you wouldn’t have a spine with text and above which you would? Here’s the long reply I gave to Blurb customer support on this frustration I’ve had with this issue: Well, thanks for clearing things up, but I really think this information needs to be advertised before people choose their bookmaking tools. If I had gotten all the way to the the cover creator before finding this out I would have been REALLY upset, since that’s like the last step in the process!
One reason this made no sense to me is that I’ve been working with personal computers & printers since 1984 and I don’t think I’ve ever run into a situation where my choice of page-design program had a significant effect on the appearance of the finished product (granted, I’ve always used garden-variety inkjet & laser printers, and not book-binding machines). If I wanted to lay out a document in Word or WordPerfect or InDesign or PageMaker or even Excel, for Pete’s sake, I could pretty much get the same end result out of a printer, no matter how many pages the document was. It also just seems to me much more natural that the problem here would only lie with the actual printing device used, and not the tool used to create the document. I just assumed you send these electronic books to the same types of printing devices, independent of the program used to create the document. If you say they do end up being printed on the same machinery, then I’d say why on earth should Word require 110 pages to have a spine with text, when BookSmart can do it with 80? It seems utterly non-intuitive to me why that should be the case.
Please pass along to the powers-that-be that this limitation with the Word add-in
needs to be fixed or advertised much more prominently. Your "Choose a Book Making Tool" page (http://www.blurb.com/make/book-tool-comparison) doesn’t even mention the Word add-in (but if it did, it needs a footnote about this limitation). The Word add-in web page (http://www.blurb.com/word-book) doesn’t mention any special limitations (to the contrary, it promises "Unlimited possibilities"). The Word "Help" web page (http://www.blurb.com/help/word-book) doesn’t appear to mention any limitations compared to your other book making tools, nor does the Word add-in FAQ page (http://blurb.custhelp.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/2063).
I chose the Word add-in in the first place because I didn’t want to hassle with learning to use a new program (BookSmart). Now it looks like I will.
Thanks again for your answer, but this has been a REALLY frustrating introduction to the Blurb service,
…Chuck
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