Blurb launches crowd-sourced books
Mike Butcher
19 comments »
Blurb, a self-publishing startup which specialises in illustrated books, is launching a new service to enable people to collaboratively create books. The new service is called Community Books and will initially launch in beta with photo sharing, which is Blurb’s most requested community-bookmaking feature. We last covered Blurb after their launch in May last year.
Using Blurb’s free desktop BookSmart bookmaking software for Mac or PC, you invite contributors and the content is assembled into one of several suggested book layouts. The software allows you to announce the book to contributors as well. As with other Blurb books, they can be shared, marketed and sold at cost or for profit in Blurb’s online bookstore. Blurb authors get to keep 100% of the book’s mark-up. There could be various uses for Community Books. For example a corporate retreat book featuring photos and funny anecdotes from the team; a ‘wrap party’ book made by people on a play or film production; or a wedding book with pictures and stories from hundreds of attending guests (the most likely use I think).
Eileen Gittins, Blurb’s founder and CEO reckons Community Book will appeal to “the connected creative class”. And I have to say the books themselves - which are full colour - really do look professional. And with a print and fulfilment operation now in the Netherlands, Blurb can also easily serve European markets as well as in the U.S.
I guess it might be possible to do something vaguely similar using Flickr and the various print services around it now, but I seriously doubt you would end up with as finished a product. Print is hard to get right.
Overall, Blurb’s business model is benefiting from the trend for content to become more and more structured online, making it easier to spit it out into a linear form like a book. There is even an emerging mark-up language standard for cookbooks, RecipeML. Founded by Gittins in 2004, funded by Canaan Partners and Anthem Venture Partners, and live since May 2006, Blurb initially came out with a tool to turn your blog into a book. Competitors like Lulu and iUniverse tend to focus on creating books out of manuscripts, rather that photo-oriented books.
Community Book is yet another shot across the bow of traditional publishers, to whom ‘crowd-sourcing’ a book would no doubt be yet another sign that the barbarians are at the gates.
Good idea, I like this one, maybe me and Bill and co-write a book like this.
http://fakesteveballmer.blogspot.com
Someone care to explain how this is any better than mixbook.com?
At mixbook, you can do the same thing, but the design of the book happens online.*
*Disclosure: I’m a self-proclaimed Flex fan-boy, but have no stake in mixbook.
Nice piece, Mike, and an interesting looking service. I have to take issue though with your final point about traditional publishers seeing this as a sign that the barbarians are at the gates.
Before starting Fridaycities.com, I was co-founder of The Friday Project, a publishing company that specialised in talent spotting on the web, and turning online content into ‘traditional’ books (i.e. sold in major book chains, with authors paid in a traditional way). We were backed by the former CEO of Orion and our sales and distribution were handled by Macmillan. So we were pretty mainstream, business-wise (although we were none traditional in our approach to Creative Commons, online promotion, etc etc).
So, in other words, I’ve sat on both sides of the gates. The fact is that the only thing that really frightens publishers is their existing titles being made available through things like Google Books or (even worse) some kind of Limewire-for-books.
Currently, the web 2.0 book companies - like Lulu and now Blurb - occupy completely different worlds to traditional publishers. Traditional publishers are generally looking for books that will sell in volume, and they work hard to build a distribution system to support that. They generally pay authors advances as well as royalties and they frequently have marketing budgets for each title. Again, it’s all geared to volume sales of a widely popular, professional product.
Publishers 2.0 on the other hand use technology to allow niche titles to exist - maybe even titles with a print run of one. They distribute online and in (generally) low volume. Very, very few authors make any money.
Personally, I don’t think the two markets compete. If I put together a book of photos from a corporate retreat, I don’t want to make money from in, and nor do I care if it’s available in Borders. That’s not the “author”’s motive for publishing, and so distribution features not a jot in the publisher 2.0’s business plan. Likewise, a book that is going to sell one - or a hundred - copies is of little interest to most traditional publishers. And if a book does really well on Lulu, you can guarantee a traditional publisher will put an advance on the table and the author will switch markets. At that point it becomes a different product.
The only blurry exception is the academic market, where a run of 100 can be very lucrative and online distribution is the most logical way to get the title to purchasers.
And that’s why companies like Macmillan (who have big scientific, technical and medical divisions) are working very closely with the web community to work out what their digital future looks like.
I guess my point is that, suggesting that traditional publishers fear the web is something of an oversimplification.
I made a book (wedding album) from this site and was really impressed by the printing quality. It’s by far the best I’ve seen from any company (Kodak/Apple, Shutterfly, Sony). My only complain was that the software was sluggish, but they may have sped it up since I used it a year ago.
SharedBook has this aleady with an open API to integrate right into your site, which is great. You can create a book with pictures, text, content etc and then allow others to contribute (They do Legacy’com’s books and I think we’ll pick them to do ours). They don’t have their own store though, but their books are nice and I prefer this model overall.
Quoop is adding this feature too I believe.
Great idea
If you are interested in seeing what a truly collaboratively, crowd-sourced book looks like, you should check out “We Are Smarter Than Me”. “We Are Smarter” was published in September and was written by over 4000 individuals. The lead authors were Barry Libert from Shared Insights (www.sharedinsights) and Jon Spector. Don Tapscott, the author of Wikinomics, wrote the foreword.
The “We Are Smarter” website is http://www.wearesmarter.org/de.....tabid=1580 and you can go there to learn more about the process and to help write the next version. All proceeds are being donated to charity.
You can also learn more about Barry’s message in this blog post - http://www.mycatalyze.org/Blog.....fault.aspx.
The blog post with Barry Libert’s discussion of community can be found at: http://www.mycatalyze.org/Blog.....fault.aspx
Considering the success of JPG Magazine, crowd sourcing of high quality, photo intensive books is bound to be successful.
I had a chance to see a whole collection of Blurb books at a Dealmaker Media conference. They simply blew me away. The stitched bindings. The thick paper. The amazing photo quality. Blurb has the highest quality self published books I have ever seen.
Blurb will do well.
I have seen that new feature, personaly I don’t know if I will use it but I will, fo sure, continue to use the rest of the wotware, the results are really nice, high quality and smooth… nothing like that in France; too bad that the service is only available for revenue sharing in the US…
Their logo hurts my eyes
If you are interested in seeing what a truly collaboratively, crowd-sourced book looks like, you should check out “We Are Smarter Than Me”. “We Are Smarter” was published in September 2007 and was written by over 4000 individuals. The lead authors were Barry Libert from Shared Insights - http://www.sharedinsights - and Jon Spector. Don Tapscott, the author of Wikinomics, wrote the foreword.
The “We Are Smarter” website is http://www.wearesmarter.org/ and you can go there to learn more about the process and to help write the next version. All proceeds are being donated to charity.
You can also learn more about Barry’s message discussing the power of community in my blog post - http://www.mycatalyze.org/Blog.....fault.aspx
I think this is a great idea. There is one more site, http://www.Kaltura.com that enables crowd-sourcing in rich media creation. They refer to it as Group VIdeo Making.
As far as I see it, the print aspect distinguishes them from others. You could create collaborative text on wiki, or on Google’s new service, and could also create collaborative rich media content and video, on Kaltura. the result in these other sites would be mainly an internet product.
It will be interesting to see how much traction these new collaborative sites get - like the http://www.kaltura.com site that launched recently for making video clips together.
please check out mixbook.com. It’s very cool. I met the guy who founded mixbook at a party recently.