I’ve always wanted to use an online self publishing / photo book service and recently I finally made time to give it a shot. I wanted to create Akuri a Christmas gift – a photo book of our beautiful dog who left us this year, Ume – so I chose blurb.com’s offering. On the blurb site, they offer a download for their book making software ‘Booksmart’. Once installed on your PC (or Mac), you get to choose from several book styles such as:

• Small Square (7″ x 7″)
• Standard Landscape (10″ x 8″)
• Standard Portrait (8″ x 10″)
• Large Landscape (13″ x 11″)
• Large Square (12″ x 12″)

Once you’ve selected a size, you then get to choose the type of book. For example, you opt for Portfolio or Photo Book where photos dominate the main pages. Or a cookbook with a layout specific to pictures with accompanying lists. Or even a yearbook with 9+ photos per page. Blurb offer a bunch of ready made templates on their site which is a great idea. Once you’ve selected the default template, you’re away. You have the freedom to change the layout of every page, selecting from either premade templates or adjusting them for your pictures. A handy indicator tells you whether your photos are in high enough resolution for the size you’re selecting also.

All in all it’s pretty good. In terms of downsides of the software, I’d say it was pretty good. Very easy to get up and running… Navigation could have been better, as could have been dragging / dropping images into the book (it’s more an “import and select” model). It appears that all your media (once imported) is baked into the Booksmart file so you can easily run into 1GB + sized files (as I did) It took me about 6 – 10 hours to complete the 100 page book of Ume (120+ photos, a bunch of text, etc). The result of course. Once you’re completed, you then proceed to uploading the book to blurb.com’s site where you can order it online. Their pricing can be seen here.

My book, which was a 90ish page Large Square format cost just under $100 including shipping. You get discounts for larger orders but this was a personal book so will only probably ever see a handful of copies made. The book took about a week for Blurb to put it together, after which it was shipped to my address.

Of course, the big and most important question is print quality. Overall I’d say it’s good. The format / layout is represented very accurately to what I saw in the Booksmart software. The quality itself is ok – I’d say roughly a 7/10 – 8/10. It’s certainly enough to impress friends / relatives / etc – but not something I’d feel comfortable putting on a bookshelf in a shop. I get noticeably higher quality out of my HP 8750 (a 13″ x 19″ printer at home) when printing on premium paper, mostly in the areas of sharpness. colour transition and noise or artifacts (particularly in areas like sky, etc).

Overall though, for what it is, it’s very good and a great example of the world of “custom automation” that we live in. The idea of being able to create a lasting memory like this with just a few hours of work is pretty much priceless. Akuri was overjoyed and I’ll definitely be doing something like this again.