Quality review of a Blurb Photobook.
A few months back I posted how easy it is to create a photo book using the Blurb Booksmart software.
I ordered a few copies of this book from Blurb for myself and for relatives, and wanted to show you what the delivered book looks like so you can get a sense of the quality of the book.
The books arrived packaged in a cardboard box that and each book is individually shrink wrapped. This is a nice touch so that your fingerprints don’t get all over the cover before you give the gift.
This book was pretty thick at nearly 200 pages. As we saw in the pricing showdown for a variety of photobook makers, a book of this size is very reasonably priced with Blurb.
Blurb Hardcovers come with a full color, full bleed dust cover. There are many different layouts, I happened to like the full bleed. You can have full page images on the front and back cover as well as on the inside flaps. This I tried to capture the gloss on the dustcover by showing you the reflectivity of the lights.
The Hardcover is cased with linen, and the pages appear glued into the binding. I can’t find any evidence of stitching on the pages or binding.
As of this writing, blurb does not imprint anything on the linen or spine.
The inside cover of the book is white; you’ll note that there is linen near the spine, which is finished with a glued white sheet of heavy paper on the actual cover. I have been satisfied so far with the quality and durability of the spine. We’ll see what happens in 50 years to see if the adhesive on the spine holds.

Inside, the photos are printed on heavy, glossy paper. The pages feel thicker and glossier than in most books, but certainly not as heavy as actual photo paper. The page weight is consistent with other art / coffee table books I own.
Held at a distance of 12 inches, there are no discernible “dots” in the printing. As you peer in closely you can make out the pattern of the dots that create the image. In comparison to magazine quality, or dust-jackets of “real-bookstore-books” the quality is on par, if only the tiniest bit more coarse. I’ve tried to create an enlargement here so you can see the pattern. This enlargement is a box roughly 5 millimeters on a side in the actual book. Note that the fine detail is preserved.
I learned from the Cool Tools website that Blurb uses the HP Indigo 50000, which according to HP achieves a quality of “812×1624 dpi when printing in high resolution mode” Citation.
Overall, I find the quality of the Blurb product quite impressive, and that is why I am a repeat customer. You can feel comfortable that you’ll get a quality product that showcases your photos.
That said, I agree with the assessment on Cool Tools. In short, bad photos will look bad in higher resolution. Blurry photos, out of focus images, scans of ink-jet-printer prints, scans of old 110 prints, overly-compressed jpgs, all will show less detail than a sharp-direct from digital images. Bear this in mind when you create your book. I have been supremely happy with the images from my 4.0 and 6.1 mega pixel cameras that appear in my Blurb BooksDon’t blame blurb if your source images can’t hold up to such high resolution printing.
[tags] photobook, blurb, booksmart, photo book[/tags]












300 dpi = standard color magazine today
(gossip magazine, celebrity, etc) :(
it’s not PHOTO quality book.
it need to be at least 1200 DPI.
also the paper so thin, like those at magazines :(
maximum 300 DPI is said by Blurb itself
at the faq section.
I am really dissappointed :(
http://sharedink.com
are so much better,
it’s for Photo Book rather than just a Book.
using online software.
it’s so expensive :(
I suggest u to red this as well.
it’s an old post.
http://www.daepublishing.com/pod/PODExposed.html
Mike,
I’d invite you to try our service as a comparison – we need a PDF file, you can create it as you like. Pop us an email, and we’ll work out a free book or massive discount or something .
Edition One
Blurb Booksmart have limitations, it could generate the PDF document. But, it’s too Low Quality PDF file and have Watermark on every page. Make it useless for distributing.
Blurb is same as Lulu and other printed on demand companies which is limit the quality at maximum 300 DPI. It’s far beyond High Definition Image (very high quality photo) which has over 1200 DPI, some even reach 9600 DPI. Blurb is a book, NOT a PHOTO BOOK.
to achieve the maximum quality of the pictures printed by Blurb, you may need this guide:
http://www.impulseadventure.com/photo/megapixels.html
the paper not really thin. it just ok for me :) .
But it so thin if compared to Sharedink.com paper.
Sharedink paper is thick and much better
for archival :) for your grandsons / granddaughters :D
300 DPI – for critical eyes, you can see clearly the tiny grains if you look closely, zoom in the paper with your naked eyes.
Blurb is getting better, I just received my first book with premium paper. The paper is quite thick (not so thick).
Also now, they print their barcode in form of a sticker instead on the cover directly, so you can peel off the sticker :)
If I close up, I can see the tiny grains. You know it’s 300 DPI maximum.
To be honest, he price is still too expensive for me.
When designing with booksmart, make sure each picture do not less than the required optimum size shown on each picture frame, otherwise resize it to be smaller – to match the optimum size shown on the frame at least.
watch out, Blurb cut / trim the edge at 1/4 inch.
when designing the front and back cover, watch out the black line, so you image safely printed.
2 years on, and your review still lives!
Thanks for the pictures.
Thanks for the review – we just saw someone’s Blurb book today and were very impressed with the quality.
We’re considering doing something other than a picture book per se – my mom’s genealogy research which would include old scanned photos and documents (or some digital photos of her old photos and documents.)
Any thoughts? We’re not looking for something to sell – just to make her happy and to donate to her genealogy library, so her family is represented.
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Excelent! I wanna one!
Hi. You convinced me to switch from mypublisher to blurb! Only problem. my layouts are all in powerpoint and I normally save each slide as a JPEG. Now with Office 2007, I can save my slides as PDF, JPEG, PNG, etc etc, so my question is, how do I save them and what slide size should I save them in. I usually mutiply the page size by three to be safe but I have no idea if that will work with blurb. for instance, if my book is 10 by 8, i will save my slides as 30 by 24. It worked in mypublisher but will it work here? Help! and Thanks for your candid review above!
I ordered 50 books from BLURB for an event. Did not have time to print the one book, unfortunately, but after making numerous books on MyPublisher.com I decided to try Blurb because I saved $5 per book. BIG MISTAKE. The quality of the photos is dark, they trimmed 1/4 inch off the inside pages and the premium paper is not acceptable. The pictures, taken with a Nikon D 80 and a Nikon D 90, print beautifully in the preview/review on my home printer, but are way darker in the book. There is no phone number, they take 24-48 hours to answer your email, and they are not responsive and won’t budge on their quality. I made a poor choice. I was SO disappointed that instead of ordering more books I RE MADE them back at MyPublisher and the quality difference is night and day. Blurb’s customer service is awful.
I ordered 50 books from BLURB for an event. Did not have time to print the one book, unfortunately, but after making numerous books on MyPublisher.com I decided to try Blurb because I saved $5 per book. BIG MISTAKE. The quality of the photos is dark, they trimmed 1/4 inch off the inside pages and the premium paper is not acceptable. The pictures, taken with a Nikon D 80 and a Nikon D 90, print beautifully in the preview/review on my home printer, but are way darker in the book. There is no phone number, they take 24-48 hours to answer your email, and they are not responsive and won’t budge on their quality. I made a poor choice. I was SO disappointed that instead of ordering more books I RE MADE them back at MyPublisher and the quality difference is night and day. Blurb’s customer service is awful.
I have questions about what to scan my negatives at? I orignally scanned 35 mm images at 3200 DPI as TIFF files, and 120 mm images at 1200 DPI as TIFF, then converted them to Jpegs at highest quality, and reduced them to 300 DPI and resized them inches/pixels to fit the Lanscape or Large Lanscape books – Did I do this right? I also scanned slides as Jpegs, but at 600 DPI, or 1200 DPI – then made the reductions. What do you recommend in terms of scanning sizes? And then do I just need to reduce the image to 300 DPI and not change any inches or pixels sizes – those will change and adjust to the image layout designs I choose?
They look good on the computer at the largest preview mode size, but I fear they will not look good on the printed page?
I like the books. I’ve created and ordered a couple copies of one book. I’m looking for a book I can feel good about offereing in my wedding photography packages. So far it’s blurb. I love the ease of the program. But I wish the book opened up flat like people would like to see. If someone is paying a lot for a wedding photography book, they would want it to last a long time. I would like to see binding options I guess and even better or thicker paper quality.
Достаточно интересная публикация, подписался на rss
I ordered my first book from Blurb last year, DISSAPOINTED. The colours were all wrong. After reading reviews on the web I still cant decide another company to try. I was looking at using creative memories. but you can only order a max of 120-130 pages? Same with mypublisher. Can someone please tell me a really good photo book company that produces top quality colour and a large number of pages 200-400+.
I have seen a iphoto book and the quality looks good, but once again, you are only limited to 100 pages.
So what resolution/type of images work best??
Согласен с постом, но есть некоторые не точности=(
Hi there!
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I’ve seen the books from adoramapix.com (never bought one myself, just saw it when I was picking up my photos)…they looked to be really good quality.
My business partner and I recently published a book through Blurb for our photography and we have been dissatisfied with the majority of our book orders. The first (3-book) order looked good, with the exception of the book overall printing too dark. We decided that since everything else looked great, we’d go ahead and place a bigger order for the pre-orders we took from our models… when these were received they looked the same. From there we placed a bigger order to have books on hand for the book-signing party we’d planned. When these books were received they were not what we expected. The back page (our thank you page with details about the book), had pink wording (not the white that was designed) and the folding of the dust jacket was horribly off on a majority of them. In trying to have this problem fixed we contacted Blurb via email (as that is the ONLY way to contact them) and they promptly requested that we send the books back to them so they could do a reprint…. only problem with this is we would not have the books in hand for the book signing so that was NOT an option and we had to settle with giving attendees of the book signing, less than optimal books, rather than the books we and they expected. Blurb did try to reconcile the problem by giving us a $50 credit towards our next order, however this is sub-par considering one book cost us $37.00 to order and we order at least 14 ($50 to $518 doesn’t exactly add up to much). In our most recent order for one of the models that couldn’t make the book signing we are even more dissatisfied with the outcome of the book. The back page is not pink as before, however the front of the book is a bluish/black instead of black/white photo edit, and throughout the entire book all of the colors look horrible, thus reflecting on our quality of work. It’s ridiculous that this company cannot check their print quality before sending stuff out the door. I would not recommend this book company to anyone in the future; particularly if they do creative editing to their images as we do… this company is NOT consistent in what they do.
Knowing how your device hardware is wired does not necessarily tell you how its resources will be mapped because some chipsets change the mapping. ,
I agree with the folks that express dissatisfaction with Blurb. I just created a book of one of my daughter’s collage stories, and ordered one copy: looked great. Got excited and ordered 10 copies: looked great too, and friends, family and co-workers all wanted one. When I ran out of the 10 copies, I ordered 10 more. YIKES! Should’ve read the comments on this page earlier and counted myself lucky to get 11 copies that were not messed up. These last 10 copies are terribly finished, with the hard cover improperly glued to the body of the book (the white paper that glues onto the hard cover–front and back–is full of bubles, as if my 4 year old had glued it). Contacted customer support and they were very nice, and agreed to send me a new set… and asked me to return the deffective ones to them! HUH?! What are they going to do with them? It makes me feel that, even though I sent them photos of the issue, they do not believe me. Also, it is the first time EVER that when ordering something that is custom-made, and having an issue, I am asked to return it to the seller/manufacturer. It is just a TERRIBLE policy. Makes the company look cheap and distrustful of its customers. Plus, even though they will–in theory–be sending me a UPS label to pay for the shipping, who is paying for my time to take the darn box of books to the UPS store?!
That’s it for me, I will NEVER do business with Blurb again. I will start looking into the services listed in this page (thanks everyone who has listed one!)
Извиняюсь за оффтоп, где вы этим летом отдыхали?
Blurb’s software is horrible. Sooo buggy and crashes often. So often in fact that they updated it and adverstised on their main site that it crashes 50% less. Why would you even advertise that your software sucks 50% less now! Such a frustrating program. Simple tasks like copying and pasting a line of text can crash the program. Their solution is to auto save every minute (literally every minute) so as you’re working, the program will freeze as it autosaves. Imagine trying to highlight text in the middle of these autosaves and having to re-highlight over and over.
I agree with Roger. Booksmart is an absolute nightmare. Select all doesn’t select all. You can’t seem to select text over more than one page. Font editing and resizing doesn’t work consistently. Very disappointed.
I just got my first blurb photobook and I am NOT Impressed. I am actually disappointed that some of my images look darker in the book than on my monitor and the prints that I have from the photo lab that I use.
2 day express shipping turned out to be 10 day shipping. This was to be my wedding sign in book, but was not used because it was delivered 2 days AFTER the wedding! First and last time ordering from BLURB
For any of you who are new to printing your photos, be aware that the image you see on your monitor will always be brighter than the printed photo — you must compensate for this when editing your photos, because monitors are so much brighter than paper. (If you know of any companies who make books like this, who do this compensation for you, along with color correction, lemme know…) Also, for those of you who have had color problems, have you color calibrated your monitor using a calibration device? That’s the only way you’re going to get the exact same color in your book that you’re seeing on your monitor. It’s too bad about the overall quality issues at Blurb, though. They are about the right price.
I just found out that they sent the wrong book to a customer I ordered for in early Nov. I’ve followed their protocol, which is, send them the issue via their “customer service”, no phone number is given and they don’t offer support by phone. They may get it right eventually, but now I’ve got to track down another half dozen or so to see if they got it right on those orders – -
Thanks for all the great info. We just ordered 5 copies of our very first book. I have to say – it was stunning! We paid the extra for premium paper and the quality is excellent. We also chose the imagewrap hard cover and it makes for a handsome looking book that when we showed others they were shocked at the excellent quality. One caution for anyone deciding to use the imagewrap hardcover – make sure you read blurbs info about the layout because you need anything you don’t want to lose well away from the edges. Another recommendation for anyone choosing to do their first book – take the time to read through the blurb tutorials, faq’s and forums – time invested there will help assure a better outcome. Another caution for individuals who are doing their first book – remember your monitor images will appear brighter than on paper. I emailed one question to blurb when I was working and received a reply within a day. Delivery time was within the range they specified as well. We were pleased with the software, the information provided and the finished book.
I’ve just put together a 120 page book on Blurb using my MacBook Pro, Booksmart, PhotoShop CS4 and the 10 mega pixel images from my Canon EOS 400D. Things are looking great on the preview screen, here’s hoping the £50 I am about to spend on getting it printed up will be worth it.
Will let you guys know the results.
Cheers
Ben
I just ordered a copy of my first book, it’s not a photo book, though and only has one image (the front cover) it was very cheap (£7.87 which is including the P+P) it is a book like the sort of book Patricia Cornwell writes (a crime novel/novella) so i’m not that worried about the picture… i’m just worried about the pages being trimmed to far, like some people have mentioned, so far i’m quiete pleased with blurb & booksmart… will leave another post when the book comes and i can have a look at the quality.
David
Действительно вы очень интересно пишите, не зря мне друзья посоветовали, спасибо за посты!
Какая-то у вас странная манера письма, но очень занимательная и легкочитающаяся)
I read this post and then worked on my own blurb book. A word of warning: I spent approximately one week scanning, cleaning up, and laying out 80 pages of jpegs in BookSmart, then prepared to upload it to Blurb, only to find that the file format (grayscale) is “not currently supported” and “may not print correctly.” BookSmart, Blurb’s proprietary program, accepts grayscale images, even though they are not currently supported by Blurb.
@Carl
You can still get great prints at 300 bro
Классный у вас диз, сами делали, или заказывали? Не подскажите где?
I was really pleased with the quality of blurb. I suggest you use this for all your publishing requirments.
Прикольно у вас диз сделан, это бесплатный шаблон или где-то делалил?
From now on I will be using this for all my publishing, I really like the quality.
I’m really disappointed with the book I ordered. The hardcover was dented in several spots and a corner was smashed in.
The quality of the photos are bad. Printing the same pictures on a very low-end color printer gives no better results.
Don’t waste your money on blurb.