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A colleague of mind found the Thursday November 29, 2007 "Toronto Star" writeup on Blurb on the front page of the Travel Section and brought it to my attention. I quickly picked up another copy of the article to share with others as I was fascinated with what the Editor of the piece was claiming. I visited the Blurb website that evening and installed the Booksmart software to investigate further. I have tried producing a "photo book" once before using a service available through Costco Warehouse Stores. Their outsourced photo book is created entirely online, quiet sluggish, very restrictive on layout and design and providing limited means to integrate text into the book; along with being VERY expensive for each page. In contrast, the Booksmart application ran on my own laptop. It afforded me many text, photo and text-photo layout pages with almost an infinite ability to choose background colours and mix with textures and borders. I was getting more and more excited about what it was offering me the longer I kept using it. I did not like the sluggishness and inconsistent results obtained when cutting and pasting and applying formatting of text elements on pages. This was the one piece of the interface I was most disappointed about. I’m a novice home photographer and was very eager to test this new service and create a book for my Mother for Christmas. Over the course of the weekend (trying to meet Blurb’s suggested Canadian deadline for holiday delivery of the 4th of December) I completed a 7×7 hardcover photo book (with text) of some 400 digital photos shot with a collection of Canon S45, Nikon P1 and Pentex M20 cameras used by my family this past summer when we were in the Maritimes. My Booksmart software "Packaged" my 1GB Project in about 20 minutes on my Centrino laptop and took 40 minutes to upload the 185MB package to the Blurb site. This entire 1 hour process was performed flawlessly by Booksmart, providing feedback throughout the process. I found the online ordering process to be smooth and ordered 2 copies on Sunday December 2. Yesterday, Wednesday December 12th, I received my UPS shipment, free of any brokerage and customs charges, on my doorstep of my home (all for approximately $13 shipping fees from Blurb). I found an extremely well packaged box with my two 7×7 hardcover books covered in high density foam shrink wrapped on a cardboard insert into this box. I was impressed. I opened the packaging and was ABSOLUTELY FLOORED by what Blurb has been able to produce for me and my Mother. I can’t say more; I think their service, their software and what they have done to provide this level of quality to the lay user to produce quality one-of books is FANTASTIC. I have been and will continue to rave about Blurb to all of my colleagues at work. I think Blurb is really on to something. They have found a niche business opportunity and have offered a product, in my opinion, that is unmatched by anything I have seen to date. I see myself with many more coffee table books in future. Don, Markham, ON BTW, I do hope that Blurb will continue to develop the Booksmart software. Specifically, despite offering MANY page layouts already; even my first go with the software—left me wanting to use a layout or two that you had not come up with yet. I would also encourage Blurb to work on their integrated text editor within Booksmart as it was too sluggish during text entry and was inconsistent or down right finicky when trying to apply different formatting to different portions of text in the same frame. Finally, it would be nice if Blurb could provide a colour choice for the hard cover binding and maybe even be able to stamp the Book title directly onto the front and spine of the hard covers themselves; along with the wonderful slip cover they currently provide – that would be icing on an already wonderful cake! All in all… WONDERFUL RESULTS.
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