Blurb, High Quality Hardback Publishing for the Amateur

blurb

Blurb Book Types Photo Book: Saw this new self publishing site from Tara Hunt’s blog and it looks pretty cool. It’s for a new beta called blurb and I’ll have to check it out.

A while back I blogged about the fact that I thought Flickr should do a photo book — not just a cheaply printed online type book, but a real coffee table type book of their user’s top photos.

I’ve also been thinking a bit about storytelling in general these days. I had a great conversation at the Flickr party on Saturday night with the quite charming Jennifer Myronuk who is working in this space. Jennifer has built tools at her site StoryField to help people organize digital storytelling. Blurb would seem like an interesting way to build a storytelling project and then at least print up the text and photo portions. You probably couldn’t integrate audio and video into a print book very well but perhaps a companion DVD could go with the book or something.

Blurb offers hardcover publishing with a dust jacket and up to 440 pages of premium, coated paper stock. At $29.95 to $79.95 per book it seems reasonable for personalized publishing — assuming the quality is as high as it sounds.

I may have to finally enter the realm of self publishing and check this one out — after all, Tara already said if I publish a book she’d buy a copy.

Flickr Turns 2, Anniversary booklet printed by Qoop.

I still also need to check out Qoop’s printing services as well of course. At the Flickr turns 2 party they had these great little Qoop Happy 2 Year Anniversary Flickr mini books that had been printed by Qoop. The quality looked pretty good.

I’m not sure if this is against the rules or not but if you want to try Qoop out you can use the following Flickr coupon code for a 10% discount that expires March 6th: d8a38b0117.

By the way, speaking of self publishing, also be sure to keep an eye out for the next issue of JPG Magazine. The theme is something near and dear to my heart, “Photography is Not a Crime.” JPG also has a Year One Box Set for sale right now which includes issues 1-4 for $59.99 — a great value.

And finally, I would be remiss if in an article about self publishing I did not mention the fotolog.book due out later this year. I’ve already purchased my advance copy from Amazon.com and am looking forward to reviewing it when it is released.

It certainly is an exciting time for the small publisher and as our tools to take photographs get better and better, it seems like the technology in the printing world is keeping up just fine.