Recent Stories

"Blurb’s BookSmart technology lets anyone with modest computer and design experience create commercial-quality books by dragging and dropping images and adding text to professionally designed page layouts. And by modest we mean that your dad could manage it, even if he hasn’t yet worked out how to use his mobile!"

"... other things, like the cover, the spine, the jacket flaps and title page, all come with easy to use templates that made the final project look just like something you’d find on a bookstore shelf."

"One of the reasons we were successful raising $$ was our position that the current book market is throttled by the tyranny of retail economics – if the tools to create and market professional quality books were truly available to everyone, how big could the book business be?"

"But perhaps the biggest opportunity that Blurb offers photographers who want to do more than show off their skills in print is the ability to sell their books through Blurb’s own bookstore. Photographers set their own price and receive all of the profits after printing costs."

"According to [Eileen] Gittins, Blurb will be the new exclusive provider of photo books for Flickr. Blurb, a DIY book printing service has added a Flickr widget to its desktop client which grabs the users photostream."

"Now, a young Henry Miller could use new Internet companies like Blurb.com... Blurb also allows authors to sell their works on its in-house bookstore, printing copies as new orders come in, and to charge a markup so they can make a profit. The company sends out a check every time an author earns $25 or more.”

"Blurb, like other publishing websites such as Lulu and Picaboo, is producing its share of baby books, family-recipe cookbooks and wedding albums. But its most enthusiastic users are drawn to the company’s extensive design tools. Stone Yamashita Partners, a consulting firm in San Francisco, recently published a 300-page book detailing the kind of strategy work it does with clients. ‘Blurb provided the highest quality with the quickest turnaround we could find,’ says David Glickman, principal at the firm, ‘as well as the flexibility and control over the look, the feel and the flow.’”

"Blurb’s BookSmart software is a free, fully functional layout program. Designing your book – if you are so inspired – can take many hours. But once it’s finished and uploaded to Blurb, there’s very little human interaction. ‘We’re the cleanest business (that) printing has ever seen,’ Gittins says. ‘There are no proofs, just finished books.’ ”

"It’s more likely, though, that writers will flock to Blurb because it reduces the risk associated with self-publishing.”

"Other self-publishing options exist on the Web, most notably iUniverse, but they are aimed at novelists, while Blurb looks to folks who want to make illustrated books.”

"For the past two years I’ve been producing high-quality books in very small quantities using several different services. I’ve shown these finished books around to many people, including those in the New York publishing industry and media, and everyone has agreed the quality is first class.”

"If iPhoto and Adobe InDesign met at a library and fell in love, BookSmart might be their offspring.”

"It used to require an army of middlemen to publish a book.”

"Soon those old-fogy relatives of yours who still don’t have Internet access (or even a computer) will be able to experience the brilliance of your blog without compromising their Luddite principals.”