S_Street's Posts

With respect to the branding:-

 Blurb prints “bookstore quality” books.

 I am a photographer and I like books.  I have quite a collection of photography, outdoor and business based books.   But that’s nothing; my wife is a bookaholic – over the years she has bought thousands, and we still have most of them.  In our home we have over 40 feet of bookshelves, all crammed full of books.  I hope that you have got the picture – I have seen a lot of books.

Looking through a random selection of our books (I certainly don’t have the time to check every one) I cannot find a single one that has a printers’ logo in them.  The publisher has a logo, often inside and on the spine, but never the printer.  In every case the printers’ name is placed in text only, something along the lines of “printed by xyz” or “printed and bound in China by xyz”.

This would seem a much more reasonable and professional approach for Blurb to adopt (remember, you are the publisher, Blurb is the printer).

One big problem that I have about the Blurb logo is that it is in such a gaudy colour that there is no way that it will be sympathetic to the colour scheme of any book I expect to publish.  It is certainly eye-grabbing and attention seeking, but can hardly be described as subtle.

I don’t have a problem with Blurb branding the books they print; I do have a problem with the logo.  If Blurb followed the convention displayed in the Bookstore Books that I already own, then a discreet “Printed by Blurb.com” in a sensible font size would be perfectly acceptable.  Then I would also feel that they were living up to their “bookstore quality books” claim.

 Steve.

I miss the ability to select All Forums.  The new forum layout is much less user friendly in that respect.

 Steve.

All that Blurb need to do is, on release of a new version of BookSmart, place a sticky thread in the Technical or General Interest forum titled “Suggestions for next release”.  The users of the software will have some very good ideas; the tech team can act on the best.

 When the next version is released the thread can be left to drift away and a new sticky created. 

 Repeat as necessary.

Steve

You can view the pdf from the Blurb website, save a copy to your computer, load it onto your website and create a link to it.  Visitors to your website will be able to download the file from your website and won’t need to go anywhere near Blurb.

You will need to do the same for the cover as the pdf preview doesn’t show it. 

Steve. 

I’m in a similar position to Brian, at the moment I’m dipping my toe in the water to see what is out there regarding bespoke book publishing. 

I have a couple of photographic projects that I am looking to publish in book form, and then to market and sell.  As soon as you deviate from the snapshot type of book the standard of presentation becomes very important – especially if you want to make a profit from it. The only way I can see revenue being generated by selling on photo books is by making sure that they fall into the fine art / high end  market.  That means top quality printing and presentation.  So I would agree with Brian.

At the moment I’m not sure that Blurb can produce the quality at a low enough price point, especially with the ridiculous international postage charges.  I’m still looking and I’m still assessing.  Blurb’s features seem to almost meet all of my needs, but there are still a few holes in its coverage at the moment.  Hopefully Blurb will fill them in soon.

 Steve.