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Henk, Don, Remko,
I have made 4 books to date on Blurb--a wedding
book, a book on Haiti, a cookbook, and a book of my own personal work. I did the
latter because of the difficulty of traveling with large gum prints on the plane
and decided to put all my work in a book and carry that. It presented its
own unique problems though but nevertheless, to see your work in a book feels
tidy.
Blurb just came out with excellent improvements on
their program this week, so I am even more excited about this company. However,
there are a number of book publishers now that are probably equally as good
(artefact studio comes to mind).
I taught a non-fiction class this semester and had
15 students make their own Blurb books as well and they were for the most part
happy with them.
Problems--you gotta watch BW images as Don
says. If Blurb does anything, it prints darker, an issue with some images
only and I am not sure why the inconsistency. Images must be converted to
sRGB.
If your image has much greater resolution than the
box it fits in, it can become grainy.
The biggest issues that I see (aside from
above): the cropping--you have to be REALLY sure to keep things 1/2 inch
away from the edge; text--seeing text on the computer looks so much smaller and
then you get it back as a book and invariably the text is too big.
One other thing I want to mention (aside from the
fact that one really should slug through all the FAQs for really helpful info)
is that there is now a company called magcloud.com where you can publish your
own magazine and that is GREAT. 20 cents a page!! So the
self-publishing opportunities are endless. You can make all your images in
Photoshop (making sure to size the page according to the Magcloud specs) and
upload a PDF. Very easy except for embedded fonts issues and the website
buttons are not logical where you go for what. I strongly suggest ordering their
how-to magazine before you do your first--it's not expensive, under
$5.
My 2 cents for this Saturday morning.
Chris
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----- Original Message -----
Sent: Friday, June 05, 2009 2:42 PM
Subject: Re: making photo books - any
recommendations?
I ordered the same book with BLURB and Mypublisher; i prefer
the cover of Myplubisher but with the premium paper of BLURB i would say that
the quality difference wasn't really worth the higher price of Mypublisher.
And the free offer Don mentioned is a bit confusing, the advertisement
looks like:
New Customer?
Get a FREE PhotoBook with your
first order.
This means ordering your first book you get two, but after that prices
are significant higher. Apart from shipping costs (MYPUBLISHER to Europe
is nearly 8 USDollar more compared to Blurb) Mypublisher is 50 percent
more expensive.
I included (tri)color, brom(oil) and inkjet prints to have a real idea
how it looks like and was happy with the result, see:
regards,
Henk
On 7 mei 2009, at 21:48, Don Bryant wrote:
Remko,
I am still looking for other ways to print B/W
without this colorshifts.
That's why I mentioned MyPublisher. Probably more
expensive than Blurb but
they have a free offer until May 11th.
Based on the Blurb books and the MyPublisher books
I've viewed, MyPublisher
wins on quality, for color and B&W work.
Don Bryant
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