Blurb Books Quality

[Steve Gledhill]

I made two Blurb books recently, an 8x10 softback and a 12x12 hardback. Both were printed on their Proline Pearl Photopaper. Both more than met my reasonably high expectations for such a book, particularly at the price for single copies. The softback is mostly b&w photographs of my Chastleton House work, the hardback is a set of images, both colour and b&w, derived (heavily manipulated) from my original photographs. The colour was close enough to the images on my calibrated monitor and the b&w were very close to neutral though perhaps tending very slightly to cool.

The one downside was that for the softback they badly mistrimmed the book - well outside their guide marking in BookSmart. I immediately emailed them a photo of their handiwork and they sent a correctly trimmed copy by return - no quibbles.

As for speed of service, all three shipments were in my hands in less than 5 working days from either the original order or from the time I complained. Which ain't bad as I'm in the UK and the shipments were from Seattle.

[Frank Petronio]

Timing can vary. Sometimes they print the books 15 miles from my house and my order is delivered within two or three days. Other times they take a week to get it on press and then another week to ship (using the least expensive option). They print wherever there is room at their subcontractors - I tried to get them to default to local vendors and they won't.

I'm surprised they would print a UK book in the USA.

Try the ordinary paper and soft binding sometimes, it is surprisingly decent. You can always swap cover designs and use the same "guts" for the hardbound book once it is perfected. I think you would want a nice thick book for hard binding or it would look silly, they can't make the hard bindings too thin.

Another trouble spot to look for is type on the spine. If you use the template and it is still off, complain!

For most complaints just take a quick digisnap and attach it to the customer service contact email form - follow the steps. Usually they give you a credit, sometimes they want the book back for forensics and to keep people honest. Shipping is on their dime.

Book - magazine - ad designers know not to put straight lines too close to the trim because even a slight error will be glaring. Not that you don't see plenty of examples of people ignoring this, but doing a bleed usually makes more sense than running a line a few mms from the edge.