I'm considering giving some gifts of photo books of my images. I'm talking about the various on-line printers/photo services that will produce approx 20 page long books of your images for $30 or so.

Have you done these? Which company? How satisfied were you? Are there any where you download their software, produce it on your computer, then email them the completed "book". I've fiddled with Shutterfly on line, and it is slow responding - maybe just busy following Thanksgiving.
thanks
Brad

www.blurb.com

I spent about a day working through their forums, all your initial questions will be answered there.

I've used www.lulu.com. You have to set out your book in Indesign or another page layout program, save it as a pdf file and then upload it. The results are pretty good but limited in terms of format - A4 or approx 6x9 landscape.

I've heard that Lulu is inferior to Blurb for photography but is a good option for text rather than picture books.

Asukabooks is meant to be better than Blurb but the price is very high.

My experience is that the hardbacked Blurb 8x10's have fairly high quality (though with the caveats mentioned in the forums). The presence of a full dust jacket and hardcover confers a high degree of professionalism.

Michael has a couple of articles:

http://www.luminous-landscape.com/essays/100-books.shtml

http://www.luminous-landscape.com/reviews/...kto-books.shtml

Possibly more expensive than you are planning - but color manangement is addressed using the above solutions - I don't see any mention of this with the cheaper services

-John

Yes, dead right. With Blurb its a matter of rendering everything as sRGB, banging up the contrast and saturation a bit and firing it off. Then running a series of test prints until you hit the look you want.

Having said this, I've had my book compared with those from far more expensive services and have been told its as good or better, colour management or no. The biggest problem with the cheaper ones is consistency rather than quality.

The best thing about a $20 hardback is that I can afford to send them out left right and centre to potential clients. That would not be feasible if they were $100+ per printing.

An article from the Guardian

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2007/...omment.internet

Outbackphoto.com has some articles on using blurb.

I have a blurb book on the way...

here's a link to what seems a decent article on color management from the blurb context, including a link to the relevant ICC profile for softproofing....

http://www.bonsai-photography.com/

The software is a PITA, but at least I got it working, I could never get the Pikto application up and running (Vista, yeah...). The economics are probably as good as it gets. My book is 112 pages for about $80 CDN.

FWIW Outbook Photo (Uwe Steinmuller) has some recent comments as well...

http://www.outbackphoto.com/CONTENT_2007_0...ence/index.html

You might want to check out Dave Beckerman's blog. He tried numerous print on demand services before settling on www.sharedink.com.

http://beckermanphoto.com/print-on-demand-photobooks/

Jenny Ellerbe

I should be receiving my first blurb book this Thursday so I will be able to provide more information at that time. In case you are curious this is what it looks like

http://www.blurb.com/bookstore/detail/117877

Well, I ran off a 30 page test book from Pikto. Since I'm on dial-up, I had them mail me a CD of their software. The software is very flexible and intuitive. The test book was in monochrome, with one or two tinted monochrome images as well. It cost me a bit over $100 CDN. I was happy with the monochrome and tinted images in the book. The monochrome images on the cover and back page had a bit of a greenish tinge--in other words, not neutral--the average viewer wouldn't notice. Images inside were very neutral. The quality of the binding and general look was quite professional.

I've just finished putting in another order for a dozen, with a few tweaks of text fonts, some layout changes, and some increased contrast for a few images. They give 10% off for 10 books or more--a nice Christmas present for friends and clients.

Next will be a colour job--curious to see how they handle colour management.

L.

I've never used these people, but they might be of interest:

http://www.graphistudio.com/

Mike.

I've done one Blurb book and was so pleased with it that I did another but was waiting to receive the second book before commenting. I ordered a small quantity of the second book in a slightly smaller format. Those books arrived today and I'm pleased with them as well. Both of my books were done in hard cover with dust jacket.

I'll be making more Blurb books.

Thanks for that Tim! Let us know your impressions of the book!

I often debated on the pros and cons between having a book printed by others, and assembling one myself, such as these:

http://www.shortcourses.com/display/display2-11.html

Here are my take on assembling my own book:

Pros:

- I am in full control of how each print appears in the book: media type, size, resolution, accuracy, color management, etc.
- I can have both color and b/w prints in one book.
- The prints are originals.
- I can add text next to an image or text only pages.
- I can proof and reassemble a book at any time.
- Each book can be unique.
- I don't have to commit to the number of books printed.
- I don't have to send out high resolution files and worry about them falling into the wrong hands.

Cons:

- Can be more costly.
- Definitely more labor intensive.

I print wedding albums as books on cooton paper and have them bound by a craftsman binder - quite expensive but very nice. A less expensive alternative (used recently for parents albums) is to use the Hahnemuhle albums, and so retain control of print quality.

Here's a link to my blurb book:

http://www.blurb.com/bookstore/detail/115450

There's a preview icon where you can look at the first few pages.

Color is ok and a pretty good match to the profile available (see my earlier post) for soft proofing. On 1 or 2 the saturation is out of whack, but you'd likely only know that by comparing the original. BW isn't as neutral as it could be - and actually seems to vary a bit from page to page (might be my imagination).

I actually found the formatting to be quite clunky and not real friendly, but got it working - eg: on the portrait format, it would have been nice to have a Left template and Right template that mirrored each other (at least I didn't find it) As it is, the comments for both L and R pages are on the left.

Economics are great - $75 for 118 11x13 pages.

Overall I'd say about a 7 out of 10. Not up to Michael's Bangladesh standard, but ok for me.

Would I do it again? absolutely, and no real incentive to try an alternative.

Tim: What output sharpening did you use? Contone 300 or one of the halftone options?