Photo books make excellent gifts

Blurb is a creative book publishing platform that enables anyone to design, publish, share, and sell affordable, bookstore-quality books.

Product Overview

Blurb’s publishing platform is comprised of three principal components:

1) Free book design and layout software called Blurb Booksmartä. Available for Mac or PC, BookSmart offers a wide variety of page layouts, multiple theme packages, and royalty-free custom illustrations designed by commercial book designers.

2) Free online bookstore complete with an array of marketing tools such as Book Preview, tagging, and Blurb Badges. Blurb customers can make their books available at cost for friends and family or set their own price and retain 100% of the mark-up.

3) Bookstore-quality printing and binding. Books are printed on demand, so there’s no up-front investment – customers pay only when they order copies of their book. Minimum book order quantity is one, and discounts apply starting at 10 copies of the same book in a single order.

Available book formats include:

• Square 7×7 inches
• Standard Landscape 10×8
• Portrait 8×10
• Large Format Landscape 13×11

All books except the 13×11 are available in softcover, hardcover with dust jacket, and ImageWrap hardcover, and are printed on high-quality 80-pound paper and feature professional-quality binding. Prices begin at $12.95 per book for Square 7×7 softcover.

How It Works

BookSmart lets anyone create commercial-quality books by dragging and dropping images and adding text to professionally designed page layouts.

BookSmart imports photos and other image files from a computer hard drive, automatically recognizes iPhoto libraries on Macs, and ‘slurps’ images from online photo sharing sites such as Flickr, PhotoBucket, Picasa Web Albums, or SmugMug. Users can place images one at a time or autoflow them to quickly produce a draft book. New slurpers and integrated import functionality are in development. Likewise, BookSmart provides complete text support to create a variety of text-rich books, from travelogues to storybooks to cookbooks. BookSmart autoflows text pasted from other applications, adding pages as necessary, or users can directly type in the page layouts. Authors can use any font installed on their computer and format font size, color, and text styles.

Finally, Blurb’s Blog Slurpers automatically convert blogs to books in minutes. Supported platforms include Blogger, TypePad, LiveJournal, and WordPress.com. Other platforms will be added in the future.

Online Bookstore and Marketing Tools

Blurb customers can order, share, market, and sell the books they make in Blurb’s free online bookstore. Users may choose to keep a book private, share by invitation only, or sell to the public. Further, Blurb’s Set Your Price program enables Blurb bookmakers to set a retail price higher than the cost, and retain 100% of the markup whenever their book sells.

All Blurb authors automatically get customizable Blurb Badges which can be placed on blogs, Web sites, or in email; when visitors click on the badge they link directly to the book’s detail page in the bookstore to learn more and/or purchase. Additional marketing tools include:

• Book description with image of cover
• Optional Book Preview
• Email announcement
• Email It to friends and colleagues
• Bookmark It to social bookmark sites

Markets

Blurb is bringing book publishing to the masses by providing an affordable publishing platform that’s accessible to anyone with a broadband connection and modest computing skills. Every family, traveler, photographer, bride, cook, poet, teacher, blogger, and artist has a book inside them waiting to be published, whether to keep, give, or sell at profit.

Increasingly, Blurb is also a popular choice for business and creative professionals who create books to promote products and services. Photographers, business owners, architects, designers, and marketing professionals have unique requirements for integrating books into their business processes, and Blurb’s print-on-demand model, order management, and fulfillment services, online bookstore, and attractive prices are driving significant market adoption in this category.

(all of this information was taken from a press release, I did receive a photo book when I wrote my review a few months back check out my Blurb Photo Book review)

My Christmas Guide Recommendations

Ages: ALL
boys and girls, moms and dads, grandmas and grandpas esp 
Gift, or a stocking stuffer, in the tree, in the mail