After my teaser I started to think about what kind of photos I have ready, to design a new blurb photo book. Of course some photos I took on our last vacation to Scotland are worth to be printed into a photo book. You can preview my book online, but if you want you can also buy a printed copy. The book is titled “Bilder einer Schottlandreise. Photos of a journey to Scotland”. Blurb offers several tools to advertise your book to your audience.

A bit further down you can see a digital live preview of the book. To implement the preview blurb is offering a WordPress widget which I simply implemented below here. But next to WordPress, there are some other options to announce your book, there is a special link to build a Facebook post, a tweet generator for twitter, a send via email option, a blogger widget and last but not least a code generator to include a book preview with a code snippet to your own website or homepage. If you want you can also create a special iPad version eBook or PDF file. For the PDF you have to know that if you have images spread over two pages the image is cut into two single pages, I could not check such a double page on the iPad as I don’t have one. My preview is showing all book pages, so you know what you are going to buy, but if you sell your own book, you might want to limit the preview to just a few pages.

But the review is not only about all those super duper options – at the end – the printed book counts. I have chosen a hardcover book with an image wrap, the inside paper has a premium quality with a lustre finish. The size is 33×28 cm (13×11 in) and is called large landscape. Pricing for this format and quality is starting at 44,36 € (36,99 £).

“ Photos of a journey to Scotland ” is not my first order at blurb . Along with Nicole, my wife, I have published two books about Nova Scotia. The 2008 published book has the same quality as the Scotland book. Our second book “Nova Scotia by Heart” has a ImageWrap, where a photo is printed onto the hardcover directly. I’m still impressed by the quality of these books, the more excited I was, to get my hands on the larger book about Scotland. The Nova Scotia books were designed with blurb’s own software BookSmart which is free to download and use. “Photos of a journey to Scotland” was designed using Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 4 .

The image wrap cover has a high quality and very thick glossy paper to protect the hard cover of your book. All is super clean crafted and assembled and at a high quality level.

Anyhow for the first time I had a few pages showing white color sparkles and some pages have marks produced by the print rolls. All books printed before were free from any errors.

Both exceptions, should not occur and they reduce my excitement on the printed book. The errors are not acceptable as you are going to pay a lot of money for a high quality book. The production time was estimated to take about 2-3 weeks after uploading the book. But the printed book was already send out and delivered after 3-4 days. For Germany the production and delivery is made in the Netherlands.

To design my next book I will return to blurb’s own software BookSmart as I found that it offers more design and layout capabilities. Especially if you like to include more text than just a by line, for text pages Lightroom is not the preferred option. Already bringing the title to the spine or typing the sub title text to the images was a bit tricky and very circuitous.

My conclusion: It is a pity that blurb delivered a book that had some issues in quality. But I can only imagine that it was an accidental slip the book passed their quality control. Anyhow I will continue to use blurb as my favorite publishing platform. The print quality and options to sell my work is something I’m missing at other on demand publishing services I know so far.

What about you? Did you already designed your own photo book? Which printing or publishing service did you use? Are you pleased with the quality they delivered? What is your experience?

Update: blurb customer service

I have submitted a request after writing my review to the blurb customer service and attached the above photos to witness the issues. Just a few hours later they stated that such quality issues are not standard and they apologized that the book passed the quality control without notice. On their own costs they send out a new book. In just a few days I will have an accurate and high quality book on my desk. What a superb service!