blurb

So I've been telling everyone I know about Blurb. I've mentioned it a couple of times on my personal blog and I'm quite excited about it so I'm going to share it on this blog too. Blurb Rocks! Blurb is just a website that you can go to and get a free download of their 'book smart' software and make a book. I've made 2 books. The first I made was 80 pages. It was for our family (the housley house). basically following our blog for all of 2008. The second book came today. It is one for Reagan. It is 160 pages and chronicles her life for 5 yrs. 2004 through the end of 2008. It turned out really nice. So here's what I like about Blurb:
~ It's good quality. I've made both of my books Hard-back with Image wrap. I upgraded to premium paper on Reagan's and I think it was worth the $. (The images are a little more glossy and clear with it.) You can make blurb books in a soft cover or a hard-back with dust cover. The Image wrap is another upgrade I think was worth it.
~It's cheap. Cheap might not be the best word...maybe economically pleasing?! Anyhoot it was surprising how much you get for the price I mean honestly Reagan's 160 page book with every upgrade available was $60.00 (before shipping $10). Really now I'd pay that much to get pictures developed!
~ It's easy. Honestly. It's not complicated to figure out and didn't take long to do. Our family book took about a week...just a couple hrs in the evenings. Reagan's took more like 2 weeks because I scanned in a bunch of her artwork, school photos etc. There are little 'Tutorials' they offer to you but I just winged it...
~ You can have Blurb 'Slurp' your blog. I really don't know what 'Slurp' means but what I've figured out is you give them your web address and they take what you got and put (Slurp) it into a book they design. Then you can edit it however you want but they do the rough work for you. I'm going to use this next year when I publish our blog. Blurb wasn't compatible w/ blogger in January but as of February they are...or so I understand.
~It's nice. I mean it's not cute like digital scrap booking but It's nice . They give you a lot of design options, page backgrounds, fonts, book sizes,etc. For some people though the options BLURB offers will not be enough . In these cases I would recommend a digital scrapbook program and then save your pages as images or JPEGS and then you could upload them to your BLURB book just as a full bleed page. Personally I just wanted to get the pictures in a book and didn't care too much about the 'cute-ness' or crafty look of it. But it did turn out cute. I know a lot of digital scrapbook companies will bind & print out books too but I've heard this can be quite pricey. I also checked out shutterfly books as an option and really considered them too. Shutterfly books are really nice and I like the glossy paper they use but they are quite a bit more $ and blurb is really quite comparable if not just as nice.
Check it out and let me know what you think...I think I should get an endorsement deal or something with this post!
http://www.blurb.com/