kathybad's Posts

Masonphoto,

We know that some of our customers would like us to offer a premium paper option. We should have an annnouncement regarding paper options very soon, potentially in time for the holidays. If you can hang on just a little while longer, we might have some news that you’ll like.

In the meantime, I need to lock this forum thread because it is at our two-page threshold. Feel free to start up a new or similar thread.

– Kathy

Hi,

Unless you have another credit card that you can order with, I suggest writing into customer support so they can help you solve this problem. 

– Kathy

Hi,

If you are not concerned about how long they take to get to you, then yes, the economy option is a good choice. If for some reason your books get lost or damaged during shipping, then our number one priority for you will be to get you replacement books. 

Hope this helps.

– Kathy

[Reposted under my account]

Hi,

We are experiencing some manufacturing delays right now that are out of our control. A book should normally take 5 to 6 business days to produce (printing, binding, and packaging) and when it slips due to a manufacturing delay, we automatically notify you of the lateness and try to upgrade shipping to a faster method if we can. If it’s too far along in the process and we can’t change your shipping, we will also notify you by email and send along a coupon good for a discount the next time you order.

When delays of any sort happen, we do everything we can to remedy the situation as quickly as we can. And we try to message you as soon as you know. If your book is still within the window of your expected delivery date, you should be fine. If it’s going to be late, we’ll let you know. If your book is way past your expected delivery date and you haven’t heard from us, please contact us so we can check into your order.

We should have book production back on schedule in both the U.S. and Europe by Wednesday or so.

Thanks for your patience.

– Kathy

Hi,

I’ve got some updates today. First of all, jcartwright, glad to hear you got the Blogger slurper to work for you. It does appear to be working intermittently, but not consistently enough for us to say it’s truly functional. In fact, we cannot guarantee it’s going to work with BookSmart right now. As I wrote above, Blogger’s API keeps changing and breaking its connection with BookSmart. Until the API is in a more stable state, I don’t see this working any time soon.

And it looks like WordPress will not make it into our next release. So, no new fix for WordPress in 2008.

Typepad on the other hand, appears to be a go. Look for a fully functioning TypePad slurper in the next BookSmart release. It’s coming soon, which means, yes, sometime by the end of the year.

And that’s it for the most recent info on the state of our slurpers.

Again, thanks for your patience.

– Kathy

Hi,

rbgool is correct. An ImageWrap cover along with a dust jacket is not an option at this point. But we’ve heard from a lot of Blurbarians who really want this feature. So, I am here to tell you that ordering a dust jacket separate from your book is something we are considering to offer in the future.

This is not one of those flip-of-a-switch requests though. An option like this requires a lot of work with and standardization needed across all of our printers, which must be tested thoroughly before a public release.So, suffice it to say, this is not something you’ll be seeing this year, but something that is definitely on the table to be considered for next year.

Hope this helps.

– Kathy

Hi redbackbwana,

Sorry to hear you cannot get into your account. Our customer support team has indeed received your messages and responded to them. I have a feeling that our responses are getting caught up in your spam filter. Can you please check your spam folder to see if our replies are there.

Let me know if this works.

– Kathy

Hi Andrea,

It’s nice to hear you had a good experience with your express shipment. Unfortunately, a lot of customers did not, and based on feedback from them, we removed Swiss Post for both Priority and Express trackable options. The choices you have now are the two most cost effective methods available to us, while being much more reliable and trackable. 

As you know, Blurb is first and foremost in the book business and not the shipping business. So, given economic issues out of our control, e.g., fuel,  we’ll continue to work with our vendors on shipping costs and while of course pass any savings on to our customers.

Hope this helps.

– Kathy

If you haven’t seen our blog post or our press release, check them out. This week we announced that we’ve moved our square 7×7 book pages over to HP Indigo presses. We’ve heard from a lot of 7×7 customers specifically asking for this move. So, now our books are standardized across all formats. That’s great news when you’ve got one book in more than one size – we know you’ll appreciate the quality and consistency.
 
For those of you ordering 7×7s, let us know what you think.
 
– Kathy
 

[Moderator’s note: this thread was inadvertently deleted while a duplicate post was being removed. We are rebuilding the thread post-by-post, but please note timestamps will be off (this thread was actually started September 2, 2008) and hyperlinks/text formatting may be affected.] 

Last week, we released a new version of BookSmart, and today, after lots of great feedback from our community, we have released a patch that fixes some major bugs tied to that release. I encourage you to download BookSmart 1.9.7  whether or not you encountered some of these bugs.

In addition to the list of new features and improvements we wrote about last week, 1.9.7 includes the following fixes and updates:
•    Image detail information on hover is back.
•    Fixed an issue in which Blogger slurper was slurping only the first 25 entries.
•    "Remove Unused Images" functionality now works as expected.
•    Improved text behavior when moving between containers and pages.  Fixed a crash resulting from backspaces crossing containers.
•    Improvements to Global Text Styles functionality include more accurate Text Toolbar updates and more intuitive style updating.
•    Updates to Undo/Redo functionality to include Vertical Alignment and Global Text Styles changes.
•    Resolved a crash resulting from applying Ornaments on Covers.
•    Added a Shortcut for "Import Book."
•    Resolved a bug in which unused containers were showing in Preview mode Thumbnail view.
•    Resolved a bug with "Change Directory" that occurred when changing to a folder for which the user does not have proper permissions.
•    Improved text highlight and select all behavior.

We’ve also made significant improvements to the way BookSmart handles spacing between lines of text. If you’re almost finished with a text heavy book, we recommend uploading your book project before upgrading, as the new changes will result in slight shifts within your text layout. If you’re ready to start a new project, you’ll appreciate this improvement, so go ahead and upgrade now.

I want  to thank everyone in the Forums for their patience as we worked through some of these new issues. Your detailed feedback has been unbelievably helpful and makes for a better BookSmart. And for that we are grateful.

Hi Tony and farenkc,

Based on your conversation above, I made a quick change to our blog post that I hope makes things clearer.

Thanks for the feedback!

– Kathy

Hi,

Adding this option is definitely something we are looking into and considering for 2009. We have no definites however as to when this might happen.

Meanwhile, keep those suggestions coming! 

– Kathy