Blurb, which I first saw at DEMO in February, is a service that allows you to create (real, offline) books from blogs and other content, and buy them for yourself or sell them to others. Prices start at $30 for a 40-page hardcover coffee-table book with a custom dust jacket, and go up from there. Look for a press release announcing the service tomorrow (Wednesday).
You need to download their software to create a book - they have both Windows and Mac versions available. I’ll be testing this out but am having difficulty downloading the 20 MB Mac client (it could be my pathetic hotel Internet access). This looks very similar to Picaboo, which I wrote about late last year, albeit with more of a blog focus.
Now if only they could somehow make hyperlinks work in a hardbound book…
Aren’t there copyright issues with this? Selling other peoples content?
Hrm– any more than novelty to their value proposition [at least in publishing blogs]? I don’t imagine most blog entries have the context included/described to give them meaning offline like this. Could be a more usefull tool for self publishing photo albums (wedding pics for my granddad?), a book you’ve written, or something more targeted in nature…
I don’t think that people will sell a lot of copies of their blog book, but a lot of bloggers may want to buy a copy or two for themselves.
Can someone tell me what’s the point here? Isn’t this something I can do with existing software and a printer? OK - I can’t get a hardback cover but tell me, what does a 40-page book look like when it’s hard bound?
And I’m pretty certain there would be copyright issues if I swiped some of say your material Mike, put it into a book and then flogged it.
Or have I missed something completely here? If not then this would have the potential for all of us to be driven back to full copyright and all that implies.
As Hugh MacLeod says though I paraphrase - you want my cartoons for your own use then fine. You want to make money off them - I’ll be concerned.
And that’s before we think about fair use under commons. Let’s please not go there.
I think it’s a great idea. If I want to make a book of an event (say a birthday) and send it to people. This would be great for a wedding photo book.
I think it will work great for photos. Say, you create a book with Flickr Intrestingness collection (with the appropriate license)? That’ll make an awesome book.
I’ve tried using their software and it is barely usable. Granted, I am on a Powerbook G4 which is not known for its performance, but this has to be the slowest app I’ve ever tried on this computer. It is frequently freezing up for seconds at a time. It appears that it was written in Java, which explains a lot.
i’ve been using the XP version for a few days now to create a photo book (coffee table) and it is AWESOME. i’ve used other ones before a few years back but blurb is the most intuitive and user friendly. it crashed a few times because i’m running photoshop and image editing apps on 1GB RAM. generated a PDF output to preview before getting it printed. so far i love it!!!
I’m not sold. If the angle is to print blogs as books, that seems like a limited opportunity. And if it’s about self-publishing in general, then Lulu (www.lulu.com) is way ahead of them.
Great idea, there are some old blogs I would love to immortalize.
The most ridiculous idea ever. I guess the bubble2.0 is here.
Don’t Cafépress do this?
That is one of the best designs I have seen in a long time. Congrats to the Blurb team on that one. Truly captivating homepage.
Michael, out of interest, would you buy your own book on TechCrunch?
In saying that, would it include the pictures in your posts and whatnot? It probably wouldn’t would it?
Do the authors get paid for their work?
I played around with it for a bit but there doesn’t seem to good way to get your blog into the program short of cutting and pasting.. i can do that with word.. I wanted to be able to enter my RSS feed and have them pull the info down from that
I’ve played with the Blurb system before and I think it’s great. Beyond blogs, I see great uses for travel journals, private clubs, and family reunions, among others. Eileen has put a great team in place and I am sure they’ll be able to deliver great products.
Does it make any money sense to you
received my hardcopy 40-page coffee table photobook printed by blurb yesterday. AWESOME!!!
i think it’s well worth it especially getting the same amount of digital photos printed at the various sizes in the book.
scrapbooking is now a breeze