AnotherSteve's Posts

Huge coffee table art books usually sell in the $80-100 range.  For Blurb, that will cover the cost of production, but doesn’t leave much for you.  My suggestion (and this is without looking at any of your work, or knowing what your book looks like), is to make more, smaller books, perhaps with tighter themes for your photo selection.  Bring the cost of making the book down to where you are comfortable charging $60-79 as a price, and see how that goes.

Of course, with Blurb, you could have both.  Huge Book, vol 1 and Huge Book vol 2, each for $149, and then compare the sale of those two books to the sales of Meduim Photo Collection volumes 1 – 5.

My 7×7 hardcover came with the vertical trim uneven.  The top was barely trimmed at all, and the bottom was trimmed quite heavily.  The page numbers are quite close to the bottom, but they are still there.  I’d say that anything further south than the page numbers in the template would be at risk.

A nice summary of the current state of the trade in POD, and very even handed.  Thank you very much for taking the time to do this.  Here’s hoping that it has some positive effects.

My wife and I used Family Tree Maker to do the first edition of our genealogy books back in 2000.  It allowed you to save the setup for any of the reporst it could make – lists of people, charts, photos, and the like – then put them in whatever order you wanted and print the whole mess out.  We made four, a book each for the lines going back from each set of grandparents.  We took them to a Kinkos to get photocopied on both sides of the page, then took the copies to a local bindery to get bound up – flat black with gold foil stamping on the cover.  (It was the same bindery that the U of M uses for getting doctoral dissertations bound up.  Any university town will have one, I betcha.)

I would love to have a way to do something similar in Blurb, but it would be a whole new area of expertise for the Blurb programmers to get into (reading in GEDCOMs, I mean.).  The shortcut for Blurb would be if it was possible to import a PDF.  It is pretty trivial to get the Word doc converted to PDF, and if BookSmart could take a PDF and turn it into a book, we’d be good to go.

I’ve been telling my wife that 2010 would be a good target date for release of the revised editions of all our books.  I bet I could get her to go faster if Blurb was an option.  The books we made before were packed with information, all in a very small font.  Terrible book design.  Blurb would be a lot nicer to work with.  (On the business side of things, the advantage there is that you have a built in audience of people who will buy the book.  C’mon Blurb, help us sell more of your product!)

Brian,

Not trying to say that Booksmart is a competitor for InDesign or similar software, not at all.  But I’d say it is still a layout program. I don’t have total freedom of choice in the positioning of all elements, but I’m still using it to lay out my book.  I’d love to see them add an expert mode that would throw things open for more creative layouts.  You could upload them, let other users rate them, download them to their own projects…  Sorry.  Too much Web 2.0 juice this morning, I guess.

Steve 

All,

I have to say that I agree that the Lulu printing looks better.  I received my 7×7 book today and was not happy with the results.  I’ll give Lulu a try, but I’m going to be sad to give up the Booksmart layout software.  Makes it easy to get good looking product.  But I really don’t like being able to see all the dots in the pictures. 

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 

The key word you’re looking for, for the Yellow Pages or for Google, is "bindery".  Those are places that put the hard covers on books, or take a year’s worth of magazines and make a book out of them for the college library archives.  They could certainly do it and the fee shouldn’t be outrageous.

Bruce,

As someone who just ordered a 7×7 photo book, your post concerns me.  This is the first time I’ve seen anywhere that the 7×7 book is done with a different process than the rest of the books.  (I just checked, and there are no FAQ hits for "toner" or "ink-based", and nothing about that under several relevant FAQ hits on "printing".)  And I wouldn’t care, except you just said that it was a lesser process, a great value but not something that you would use if you care about quality of results.   Given that there is no easy way to convert a book that is already made from one size format to another, shouldn’t it say something about that right in Booksmart when you are deciding what size book to make?

I just got the email that my book has shipped, so I’ll try to keep from freaking out until I actually see the book.  It looked so good on the screen and I was really happy with it.  Now, instead of excitement to see the product, I’m really apprehensive.  I was going to order six more for Christmas gifts if this one looked good.  Now I need to make contingency plans for gifts for all those people. 

Steve

drupnow, your point is a good one.  I’ll (mostly) withhold further commentary until I see the book.  Who knows, maybe I’ll even get lucky and get the printer that doesn’t need barcodes.  The only further thing I’ll say now is this – I don’t like it because it is a surprise.  Everything else in the Booksmart is WYSIWYG.  I may want a different layout, but I’m free to do that up in another program and drop it in as full bleed.  I may want my page numbers to start with the first chapter instead of on the copyright page, but I’m free to renumber the pages.  There are constraints, but you can do a lot within them.  And once I’m done, I know what I’ll get. 

Except for this.

The short answer is "as much as you can get."  :)

The more reasonable answer would be to look up some photographers and some graphic designers in your area and get quotes from them for the same scope of work.  You might call a college of design if you need leads.

My guess is, that once you do that, you will be shocked at how much a professional will charge, and you will not want to charge your friend so much.  Then you need to drop back to your estimate of how long it will take to do the work and how much do you want to be making per hour.  Since you have not done it before, your estimate will be wrong, but those extra hours are your costs for attending the "school of doing it the first time."  Next time you do one, you’ll know better what is involved, and you’ll be able to make a better estimate. 

Ben,

Thanks for your answer, but it doesn’t quite address the problem.  The issue that Yannis and I are describing is not a matter of where Booksmart is installed.  I had no trouble installing it on the D:\ drive.  The problem is the location of the booksmartdata directory.

My experience (with 1.8.1, have to say I have not checked 1.9, as I am not going to upgrade until after the book I am currently working on) was that Booksmart did not put the data directory in the same drive or partition as my home directory.   I moved my home directory to the D:\ drive months ago.  Instead, Booksmart created a new "My Documents" folder for me on my C:\ drive, where it would be by default, and put the booksmartdata folder in that location.  Yannos indicates, in his original post, that the same thing is still happening in 1.9.  

I am a programmer myself, and I have to say that I find this to be very bad behavior by the program.  It appears that the location was hardcoded, rather than the current user’s home directory being looked up.  If that is not the case, then something else is wrong.  (I wouldn’t have found the data at all, except that Picasa picked up the cover .jpg.)

Best would be a settings dialog where you can override the default location in the program.  Maybe you would like to avoid that, in order to have as clean as possible a user experience.  The minimum expectation would be that the program at least uses the user’s actual home directory for data, rather than making up a new location.  I personally don’t expect a full release for such a small code change, but I would hope that this could make it into the next 1.9 patch release. 

Thanks,

Steve 

I figured out what I was doing that didn’t work.  I was expecting Blurb to reflow the text as I was typing, in the manner of Word or Pagemaker.  Blurb doesn’t reflow the text until I click somewhere outside the text box, then it reflows the text and updates all the thumbnails.  So you can’t see how things look dynamically, but it is close enough for my purposes.