Personal book publisher Blurb launches

May 3, 2006 | Michael Bazeley | Comments |
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Blurb is a new San Francisco company that allows people to create their own books on their desktops. Downloadable software aims to make it easy to merge text, graphics and photos and to design the book cover. Then, upload the book to Blurb and they’ll print it for you. The nice thing about Blurb is that you can order just a few copies of your book. So you can make coffee table books of your favorite photos for friends or family. Most traditional printers won’t even talk to you unless you have a bulk order.

Blurb can also slurp all your blog postings and turn them into a book.

The concept is not entirely new. Mac owners can order photo books staright out of iPhoto. Qoop provides a similar service. And Lulu is another self-publishing company that has been around for a while.

We recorded a podcast for Inside Silicon Valley with Blurb founder Eileen Gittins where she talks about the Blurb vision and how her company is different.

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  • Admittedly having taken a very cursory look, it seems that their pricing is a lot higher than something like lulu.com and the service is a lot more limited. Lulu works more like a publisher- you can do one copy or you can have them wholesale the books for you and split profits. Obviously you have to create a market.
    As a consumer thing, you've also got Apple and KOdak offering custom color one-off books at similar prices so I'm not sure what's interesting here.
  • rod
    I'm interested in creating a one-off book that contains photos and text. The Apple and Kodak sites appeared geard more toward photo books