Recent Stories

For a surprisingly low sum, Blurb will take your digital photos and help you assemble them into a bookstore-quality photo book that will make a great present for someone you love.

Two years ago Larissa Leclair founded the Indie Photobook Library in her Washington D.C home with the goal of preserving rare self-published books and making them available to a larger audience. She hopes the collection will one day land at the Library or Congress for safe keeping.

Digital Self-Publishing has grown tremendously in the last few years. Many major players in the game have all unveiled tools and content distribution methods to help authors gain exposure and make money. Comic books, graphic novels, ebooks, and kids books all have viable avenues for people to pursue. One of the main elements that has been left out the mix is magazines. Blurb is seeking to quickly remedy this situation with new tools for Adobe InDesign.

As publishing transitions into the digital space, that doesn’t mean we’ll have to abandon print entirely. In fact, Blurb has built a successful business by offering “accidental authors” an easy way to write and self-publish custom print books on demand, all through a digital platform. In May, the company added e-books, giving people a tool to publish their work as iPad and iPhone versions.

Illustrated books are not finding the same success in the digital publishing world as plain-text books; San Francisco- and London-based self-publishing service Blurb aims to change that. Earlier this month, Blurb, launched in 2006 and known for helping users create high-quality illustrated books for print-on-demand distribution, launched a new suite of tools for production and distribution of enhanced e-books.

Blurb®, the creative publishing platform, today announced that new versions of its award-winning BookSmart, Bookify and InDesign® Plug-In creation tools will enable customers to simply and easily convert their new or existing print files to ebooks, adding video, audio and live links to enrich the storytelling experience.

The best reason for would-be-self-publishers of photo books to use Blurb's do-it-yourself tools is the most simple one: Blurb was founded to service would-be-self-publishers of photo books and them alone. And now Blurb has gotten into the e-book space, which has prompted a few tweaks to the company's traditional print-book products.

“The new service, named Publish, uses a free Adobe InDesign plug-in from Blurb and includes templates for four cover formats, five paper types, and eight trim sizes - including a new 8.5"x11" size exclusive to Publish. CGX added that Publish will also enable creative professionals to finish their projects up to 75% faster using Blurb's custom proofing tools and automated pre-flight checks.”

“I have a Blurb book, made from my Instagram photos, and it is great — high quality and beautifully printed. I can’t see how — thanks to higher quality photos you’re using — the Lightroom version wouldn’t be even better.”

“So here I am, a photographer, an insane reader and a web entrepreneur. I put those three things together, and out comes this ability to make a print book available to everyone in the world who has access to a browser and 10 bucks. Why should it be the purview of publishing industry to decide who gets published and who doesn’t?”

“Books enable photographers to self-publish their work using layout tools in Lightroom, then save the finished product to PDF or send the job to Blurb. The Blurb integration is actually very tight. As authors add pages, for example, they see an updated estimated price for Blurb printing in the inspector.”

...Blurb [has] made it easy for anyone with a PDF or text document to create and order a relatively small number of books, which works well for teachers who only need enough books for their students.

In a precise parallel to the office-printing boom, print-on-demand is creating an odd new phenomenon that Blurb founder Eileen Gittens calls social publishing. Photo-and-storybook records of camping trips or corporate retreats are created as mementos for participants. There are technical manuals devoted to superniche software. And there are oceans of memoirs and poetry books, often printed in runs of one.

Thanks to the ever-growing popularity of Instagram, the world is now inundated with lo-fi images of things people love—memorable meals, beach sunsets, fixed-gear bikes, and so forth. And what better way to commemorate the things you love than with a beautiful, 7-by-7-inch Blurb photo book? Books can range from 20 to 160 pages in size and be bound either softcover or hardcover. Blurb automatically enhances the resolution for printing. It's a great way to share and show off your favorite Instagram shots.