Photobook Publishing with Blurb and Without iPhoto

If you watch much TV, you've probably been bombarded with the Apple ads where the slacker hipster tries to convince you that without a Mac and iPhoto, you can't possibly create neat photobooks out of your photos. At least not as neat as those.

However, it's not like Apple actually came up with the printer to do these books. Fortunately, the people who *did* come up with the printer and the process also sold it to other folks and you can get the exact same books from your Windows PC or your Mac.

One of those services is Blurb. As you probably know, I'm working on a photobook of Creative Commons photos. As part of that process, Blurb came up on several fronts as the most likely choice for getting that book printed.

Before going too far down the road of committing to using them, I pulled together a prototype book using the first pass of nominated photos. Blurb provides an application to to put your book together. It's pretty much a wizard (I'd like something more freeform), but the included templates aren't bad at all. At any rate, you drop the photos onto pages and type in your text into the slots and your book comes together in quick order.

Note that photos are cropped automatically to fit the photo slots. Unfortunately, you can only either take the auto cropping or shut it off altogether. If you need custom cropping, I'd suggest doing it before you import the photo into the book software.

I pulled a book of about 100 pages together and uploaded it. The upload takes quite a while, but when it's done, the book shows up on their site for ordering. You can either keep it private or make it public for ordering and add your profit margin. My book came in just under $30 for the cost. For the project purposes, the final book will be about this length, with $5 added on (which will all get sent to Creative Commons, the charitable organization).

I ordered the book last week and it arrived today. I have to say I'm impressed. I really like this book and am excited to get the real one put together. Beautiful photos on nice, heavy paper. Hopefully, when the book comes out, you'll buy one too and see just how nice they are.

In the mean time, if the idea of sitting at a table full of paper, specially-shaped scissors and markers, making scrapbooks sounds about as fun as watching paint dry, this is a quick way to turn your vacation photos into something worth sharing and you never have to worry about someone spilling glitter on your carpet.

PS. They also offer a way of having your site compiled into a book, but only support a couple of specific hosting services as the source, which . I actually am thinking of compiling the best stuff from this site into a book, but will probably use Lulu for that, as it's primarily text.