Blurb, the on-demand print service with a specialization in photographic layouts, is expanding its “crowd sourcing” strategy onto, where else, but Facebook with a new app that brings people together to create professional quality books.
This past October Blurb deployed a new feature for its desktop publishing software called Community Books that could be used to create books with others. The new Facebook application, called GroupBook and found here, does essentially the same thing except without the need for any download on the part of your friends.
Want to compile a book with all of the photos that you and your friends took at graduation? Invite them to participate in a GroupBook project and they can contribute up to 20 of their own photos with a simple upload form on Facebook. Once the contribution period ends, you can turn these photos into a book with Blurb’s BookSmart desktop client.
My only real gripe is that friends can’t submit captions along with their photos, leaving book owners to make ones up themselves. Also, you can’t pull photos directly from Facebook collections – a limitation imposed by the social network itself since Facebook doesn’t store and serve high enough quality images for print.
Blurb’s social features form a smart strategy in an age when electronic media is replacing many printed materials. I imagine this will help the company drive demand for so-called “personal” books, ones created not for profit. It shouldn’t have an effect, however, on the print of marketing materials, which form half of Blurb’s businesses.
When asked about Amazon’s recent foray into on-demand print services, CEO Eileen Gittins expressed a lack of concern that it would cut into Blurb’s business. Since relatively few people use Blurb to create books intended for sale (on Amazon or elsewhere) anyway, she doesn’t think the giant ecommerce site has any real competitive advantage in this area. Plus she thinks Blurb’s economics are better because the company does not take any cut from the sale of books, it just charges printers for the leads it makes.
This is a great way to ruin relationships… let’s say a book happens to become popular but you had a bunch of people involved in what you all thought was a “non-profit” venture that ends up being worth millions… this is a headache just waiting to happen. You write a book, that means YOU write a book, not a community of “friends” (aka strangers).
Jon
http://dreamclue.com …get the message!
Congrats to TC 806K feedburner readers, as seen just now…
Blurb is a great tool but they are not going to gain much momentum with this application. New applications are pretty much dead on Facebook and FB already has partnered up with another photo book publishing company to make books for their users straight from their albums. Facebook is a time waster for Blurb unfortunately.
@Brick, just curious -what photo book company is that? (hope it’s picaboo)
Seems like most facebook applications don’t help companies monetarily any; the top ones are saturated and the new rules are restrictive. Anyone know of any that generate real revenue (or push massive users which then turn into revenue) from a facebook app? Where’s 500 hats when we need him…
Mark, thanks for the post on http://Blurb.com, they’re new to me and it looks like a fantastic offering.
“shouldn’t have an effect”
(”affect” is a verb.)
Kaltura, a company that I have been following (specializing in collaborative media, and open-source video) had launched a group-album application several months ago. Their group-album application enabled not only to collaboratively contribute photos to albums, but also to add videos, including annotation on top of videos and photos.
I’m also new to Blurb and their publishing program. I haven’t seen one of their print-on-demand photo books, but it would be interesting to see the quality. There are a lot of aspiring photographers that this may be of interest to.
There are two other sites that let you collaborate on book writing that ends with a tangible book. webook let people add content to open book and the best is selected for print and tikatok let kids create books together.
Blurb is useless as a printing tool as they are completely unreliable and their customer service leaves much to be desired. Shipping dates at for Christmas were late and they are doing nothing about it. There isn’t even a phone number or a rep you can call to change the order. If you are running a professional business of any kind they are completely unreliable.