Blurb – Black and White Text Book quality review

I’ve made several books before, but I’ve always been tempted by Blurb’s “Black and White Text” books.  They come in both Trade (6×9″) and Pocket (5×8″), and are significantly cheaper than their other offerings.  You still get a full colour cover, however the inside pages are “cream” and while called “Text only” books, Blurb advises that:

While perfect for text, the textured, low-contrast paper also gives black and white photos and drawings a decidedly edgy and lo-fi feel. 

I’d been reluctant to try as I couldn’t find a single review on the web about printing pictures in this type of book.  So I thought I’d give a quick summary of how it turned out and a few sample pictures side by side with the originals to see how it looks.

Sorry about the thumb, had to hold the book somehow!  Anyways, as you can see, the paper is definitely cream colour, which affects the whites.  Also, the blacks are not that “deep” compared to the original (a scanned black and white negative).  That being said, it still looks fine, not sure if I find it edgy, but lo-fi perhaps.  The type of picture above (contrasty, lots of light and dark but not so much midtones) seems to work best with this format.  It isn’t as good as the original but it’s not bad and not a lot is lost due to the printing.

 

The above picture shows where this format doesn’t work.  The picture has very small differences in shades of dark grey along the fence line.  In the original you can see these differences clearly, in the book however, most of the detail is gone, in fact the one pedestrian is even hard to see.  While this is disappointing, now that I know, I will refrain from using this type of picture.

Finally, this picture shows the quality of the printing up close.  The picture was printed 3.5×3.5″ so it has been blown up significantly.  As you can see, the printing really looks a lot like newsprint.  Good quality newsprint, but newsprint nonetheless.  Again I’m not being critical of this, just pointing out what you can expect from this type of book as examples are hard to find on the web.

Overall I’ve been quite happy with the book.  You can’t beat the price at under $10 for a 150 page 5×8″ book.  So long as you know what types of pictures to include or not to include, you can have an excellent book for a rock bottom price.

If you’re in need of a 5×8″ calendar (day planner) with pictures of Paris, or if you just want to check out the print quality for yourself, click here to see my book (or buy it if you like!).

52 Create – Craftvent Calendar, Day 9

52 Create, my weekly creative output for 2011.  Continuing along with my “Craftvent” calendar for my 2 year old daughter.  Simply put, it’s an advent calendar filled with crafts, all home made, many will be joint projects so she gets some fun of making stuff as well.

 

Day 9 – Another book? Yep.  She liked the yesterday’s book so much, I thought I would make her another one.  One of the grocery stores in Paris gives out packs of sticker to kids when you’re at the checkout.  They also give you a special book to put the stickers in, but it’s too big and busy for my 2 year old and she gets distracted with all the various pages.  So I got her a small book that we then spent most of the afternoon ripping open the sticker packages and filling up the book.  Pretty simple but fun.  It’s also a great size to throw in my jacket pocket or bag in order to entertain her while out and about.

My other Craftvent Calendar Crafts

 

52 Create – Craftvent Calendar, Day 8

52 Create, my weekly creative output for 2011.  Continuing along with my “Craftvent” calendar for my 2 year old daughter.  Simply put, it’s an advent calendar filled with crafts, all home made, many will be joint projects so she gets some fun of making stuff as well.

Day 8 – Today I gave my daughter a personalized ABC book.  It spent a few nights filling out the pages, I’m not much of an artist, so finding words that begin with each letter of the alphabet that I am also able to draw is a bit of a challenge.  I got to Y and decided I couldn’t draw a yak, so the Boat from letter B became a baseball, and Y became a yacht.  We read the book together today and I was impressed that she new what most of the pictures were, so either I’m a better artist than I think, or my kid is a genius.  A win either way.  I alternated one page of capital/small letter and one page of drawing.

My other Craftvent Calendar Crafts

52 Create – Wooden Kids Book

52 Create, my weekly creative outlet for 2011…  My little (and only) niece is celebrating her first Easter, too young for chocolate, so how about her very own personalized book?  I’ve had this idea in the back of my head for about a year, and I even cut the wooden blanks out for the pages at least a month ago, but it wasn’t until the last couple of days that I designed the page in illustrator and printed them out on t-shirt transfer paper.  The wood is 1/8″ plywood and the designs are simply ironed on and covered with a thin coat of spray on lacquer (food safe of course!).
I think these could be a real hit on Etsy as once the design is done, it’s fairly quick to assemble, and I could put a personalized name on each book.  The only issue is I don’t feel the t-shirt transfer will be very durable.  I’ll be keeping an eye on this book to see how well it holds up.

My other 52 Create Projects

My Etsy Store.

Creative Inc.

Previously on Craft Collective I reviewed Craft Inc., a fantastic book about turning your creative hobby into a successful  business.  I’m pretty excited to see that Meg Mateo Ilasco and Joy Deangdeelert Cho have followed up Meg’s first book with Creative Inc. This book is similar to Craft Inc. except that it is designed for photographers, graphic designers, freelance artists, etc.

Get your copy from Chronicle Books

Meg Mateo Ilasco

Joy Deangdeelert Cho

The Xpan Book

It’s published!  Matthew Joseph got a bunch of us Xpan owners together through flickr and put together a book of 32 Xpan pictures (colour and black and white) to be published and sold on Blurb.  All the photographers donated their images, and any proceeds will go towards a charity.  It was quite the undertaking for Matthew Joseph, lots of haranguing to get photos and text from everyone, but he did a great job pulling it all together.  Due to the wonders of alphabetical order, I got the first shot in the book!

To view/buy the book

My picture.

Book Review: Indie Publishing

After two books through Lulu.com, I’ve become very interested in Publishing on Demand printing.  But while these services offer printing (and some editing), there isn’t much towards style or even just making your book look cohesive and not just a jumble of multiple fonts and layouts.

I saw “Indie Publishing: How to Design and Produce Your Own Book” on the shelf at Upper Case and I decided I had to buy it.  I read the book in an afternoon, it was that exciting!  The book, edited by Ellen Lupton, goes over everything you need to know for self publishing.

The book starts off covering all the various types of book designs, from novels to zines to portfolios.  From there it branches off into book design and layouts. How to pick fonts, the best way to set up your pages, etc.  While the first part of the book is directed at the Publish on Demand crow, the book does have a long section on fabricating your own books as well.  There are excellent pictures and descriptions that guide you through making hard cover, soft cover, stab binding, single signature, and accordion style books.  Many of these designs are actually quite simple to do once you see the directions.

The book wraps up with an excellent section on Indie Inspiration, showing all sorts of different book designs and styles. I found by the time I got to the last section, I was already raring to go, but these indie books certainly gave me some extra guidance.

While Blurb wasn’t rated the top photo book, and Lulu wasn’t even reviewed, the other photo books that were reviewed aren’t really set up for desktop publishing, more for photos only.  I’ve heard many good things about Blurb so our next book will likely be through them.

Lulu Encore…

After last year’s great success of our own “yearbook” with Lulu.com, we decided we would do it again this year.  To mix things up we went with US Trade as the format (6×9″).  While last year I really wanted a square format, this year I found the 6×9 to be more my liking, similar to what you get in Make or Craft magazine.  We chose perfect bound again and were quite please with the finish of the book.

I managed to fix some flaws from last year’s book where it was meant to be full bleed (right to the edge of the paper), yet it was not always printed that way.  It turns out that although you design it in InDesign to do full bleed, unless you check this off in the PDF creation, all your efforts will be lost.  The curious thing is the Lulu preset for pdf files does not have this checked off???  Otherwise I found it a big improvement from last year that Lulu has their own PDF presets you can download in order to be sure it is the correct way.

While the printing was good, I did find the pictures to be too dark, and any pages where I put a solid coloured background you could see white patches within the solid colour. One page that was supposed to be black was definitely more of a charcoal.   I’d like to see Lulu try some different paper types.  A semi-gloss might be nice for a photo book IMO.

The book was a bit longer this year, 85 pages bringing the price up to $23. I was a little dissapointed that Lulu sent me an online coupon for 15% off, but when I tried to use it I was told it was only for UK residents. If they know I am Canadian, then why would they send me this coupon?  After much searching around the net, I did find an online coupon but only for $10.  A week later I received another coupon from them, this time for 20% off. Considering I bought 13 books, this would have saved me quite a bit of money!

Next year we will order one copy for ourselves in a hard-cover, while the give-aways will remain soft-cover (too expensive!).  We may also try yet another format next year, who knows.

DIY Book Publishing

While it would seem with all the technological advancements of today that we are moving away from printed literature, I think at some levels, due to Print On Demand (POD) services, printing has never been so common or affordable.  Almost a year ago, my girlfriend and I self-published a sort of “yearbook” of our happenings.  While it was quite a bit of work, in the end it was well worth the effort, and it certainly opened my eyes to the world of self publishing.

 

We used lulu.com to publish our book.  Lulu is a print on demand service that does everything from the usual photobooks all the way up to self publishing, editing, and even design for you.  They even have a service to advertise your book on Amazon and give it a ISBN.  There are of course costs for all of these services, but if you are a beginner author/photographer, this could be a small step in the right direction for you without a huge outlay of funds.

 

Books can be made in a variety of formats, landscape/portrait/square, coil/saddle/perfect bound, and soft/hard cover/dust cover.  On top of this there are now two paper types and the option of colour or black and white.  So why doesn’t everyone publish there own books if it’s so darn easy? Well there is a catch, read on…

 

Lulu is a print on demand, they print what you ask them to, when you ask them, and in the quantity you specify.  Unless you pay them big bucks, that is all they do, so it is up to you to do all the typing, photos, and layout.  I chose to do my layout in InDesign by Adobe.  Very powerful publishing software that took a while to learn, but by the last page of the book, I was quite adept at it.  A year later, I must confess that I’ve forgot most of it unfortunately… So if you don’t possess those skills, or are not willing to learn, this may be an insurmountable hurdle.  Photobooks may be best for you in this case as you can simply drag and drop your photos into the templates.

 

I found the printing quality quite good, nice colours, consistent from book to book (we ordered 12).  My only complaint was I found that the pages weren’t always cut completely straight. You could tell as on some pages I left a slight border around the pictures, and the border was definitely not the same size along the whole length of the page.  It was a minor flaw and one that no one else noticed.

 

Shipping was also a bit expensive up to Canada (from US), however this got better with ordering larger numbers.  A year later and we are currently starting work on our next book, likely will be a new format (US trade, last year was 8.5″ square), and maybe a few more pages if the budget allows.  Cost for a 80 page perfect bound colour book is around $20 USD.