Garrett Ross Photography

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  It only took a year but I forgive you Joe. The images and stories alone make this one worth the wait.

  • #books
  • #photography
  • #inspiration
  14 Dec 2011 / 1 note
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  A Blurb Review

  I just recently finished a project where a I put together a book for a nonprofit that did some work in Yellowstone National Park. It was a fun little project and I used it as an opportunity to check out Blurb and how their books compare to some of the other services (mpix and whcc) for photo books that I regularly use. 

  Blurb has an interesting approach where you can put together books and then sell them through their site and actually price the book so that you can make a little money off of it while they handle the reproduction, sales, shipping, etc… For the right type of book and person, this definitely is an interesting model and I’ve been interested in just how good their services are and more importantly, the quality of their books. (Note: the project I did is not intended to make money off of this but to have a memorabilia for all participants who volunteered their time. Creating a private book on Blurb provided an easy way for me to conduct the passover for their purchasing. And the client is happy.)

  Why I chose Blurb for this project:

  MPIX and WHCC are great for photo books but they have a few big limitations - the ability to work well with layout software (InDesign - and no, Photoshop is not a book layout tool, no matter how many plug-ins you get for it), how they handle books with lots of text, books with a lot of pages, and price. In fact, many book services don’t do all of those well as most do a weird process where they have you use their messed up software that is slow and buggy and not exact or they make you upload pages as jpgs - ugh! This all adds up to a lot of lost time in production and it creates a system that is not fully trustworthy. So I chose Blurb because it works well with InDesign, allows uploads of pdfs, and the directions are straightforward for their book types.

  So how was the quality?

  To be honest, I was actually impressed. I got the standard, image-wrapped hardcover version and the images and layout reproduced pretty well. Good enough that I am going to try a premium photo book to see how it compares directly with WHCC and MPIX. Plus, I felt like I could finally design with text again and be able to trust how it was going to be laid out. And the price for a 52 page book was a lot cheaper than the other services. 

  So if you like using InDesign to layout your books, give Blurb a chance. You might be pleasantly surprised while in the end save yourself a couple of hours and some money. Heck, you might even make some money:)

  • #books
  • #blurb
  14 Apr 2010

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