Recent Stories

“Online book publishing service Blurb today launched a new way to publish collections of photos - as an eBook for the iPad... Easy and cheap publishing for a widely used and attractive consumption platform sounds like a beautiful thing.”

“Blurb, the self-publishing giant, and sponsor of the Photography Book Now, announced the competition’s $25,000 Grand Prize winner today—Italian photographer Valerio Spada for Gomorrah Girl. The book, which lead judge Darius Himes, assistant director of Fraenkel Gallery and co-founder of Radius Books, described as compelling, explores the murder of Naples resident Annalisa Durante, a young woman caught in the crossfire of violence in ‘the land of Camorrah,’ (the name for the Mafia in Naples).”

“What started as a self-publishing startup for do-it-yourself bookmakers has become a multi-platform storytelling service, adding an app for iPhone and iPod Touch in April, and most recently, an iPad iteration.”

“Like most of Blurb's other books, the whole package is nicely put together.... The images themselves honestly look better than I expected.”

Inc. staff writer Kasey Wehrum spoke to successful business owners, including Blurb CEO Eileen Gittins, about their most memorable summer jobs and how those early experiences influenced their career paths.

“Blurb has gained considerable market traction. By 2010, it had delivered 1.4 million books to 74 countries on five continents. Blurb has 725,000 paying customers... By the end of 2010, it paid a cumulative total of $2 million in mark-ups to its authors.”

“Blurb, a veteran self-publishing startup for do-it-yourself book makers, is launching Blurb Mobile for iPhone and iPod Touch Thursday to let users tell stories in a whole new way.”

“In 2004, with the publishing world racing to embrace digital platforms as its ticket to the future, Eileen Gittins proposed a business plan that moved in the opposite direction. She wanted to give ordinary people the ability to design and produce their own bound, bookstore-quality books. Publishers and investors were skeptical. But seven years later, Blurb, the San Francisco–based company that emerged from Gittins's contrarian vision, has grown into a runaway success.”

“Blurb has a downloadable app called BookSmart that lets people create high-quality photo books. Today it introduced an online tool, Bookify, for those who want to create a book without bothering with downloads. Eileen Gittins says Blurb users will be able to dramatically cut down on the time it takes to create albums via the online tool.”

“As a photo editor, I never thought very highly about the custom photo books available online. Then, over the past year, photographers started submitting a whole new class of professional-looking books of their work from a company called Blurb. The finished volumes were so good-looking that I had to make one for myself. The results were so impressive that when I gave a copy to my wife’s parents, they mistook it for something we picked up from Barnes and Noble. When they saw our names on the cover, they burst into tears.”

“The minute I meet Eileen I like her.[...] I want to know more about her story. How did she get from being ‘an artist at heart’ to one of the most successful female entrepreneurs in San Francisco generating $45m in revenue in 2009 and shipping 1.2 million books to more than 60 countries?”

"The point of this company is not that we're selling 20 books, each of which sell 30,000 copies, but we're doing 30,000 books each of which sells 20 copies. [...] So Blurb becomes a really great outlet for those people who are trying to either break in to build an audience or are publishing because of personal passion."

"With the advent of self-publishing platforms like Blurb, it’s never been easier to print your own book. Blurb helps people print beautiful on-demand versions of books without the headaches, longshots, and wasteful printings of major publishers […] Blurb for Good not only helps people and nonprofits publish books in an aesthetically-pleasing, cost-effective way, but also includes opportunities to help raise money for those nonprofits. […] Seems like a fantastic resource for the DIY and socially conscious sets among us."

"Blurb, the creative publishing and marketing platform, today announced the launch of Blurb for Good, a platform that enables citizen philanthropists and nonprofits to create and use books as a means to generate awareness, goodwill and monies for social causes."