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.

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The print-on-demand book business has thrived in the last few years as players such as Lulu, Blurb and others have catered to publishers looking to reduce overhead on inventory. It will be very difficult for anyone to compete with Amazon in the print-on-demand space.

The decision may also cause book prices to rise with the Wall Street Journal reporting that Amazon BookSurge prices are higher than other print-on-demand providers.

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TasteBook is a service that lets users take their favorite recipes from partner sites (starting with Epicurious) and create printed cookbooks that are delivered to them and/or friends. Users can add their own recipes as well, and customize the book with their name and other information. Blurb, which was recently in the news, is somewhat similar but does not focus on recipes.

A book with 100 recipes costs $35.

TasteBook is based in Berkeley, California. It was founded in February 2007 by Kamran Mohsenin, the co-founder of Ofoto (now the Kodak Gallery), and Greg Schroeder, formerly the chief technical architect of Ofoto.

The size of the Condé Nast investment is not being disclosed. A year ago they acquired Reddit; however, to date they have not been known for making non-acquisition investments in startups.

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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.

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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…

A few companies caught my eye today as the ones to watch this year. Here they are:

Blurb

Blurb will turn your blog or other website into a book. As in, a real, tangible book that you can hold. The service is now in private beta and will be available to the public in March(ish). CEO Eileen Gittins does a great job describing the product and this looks to be an interesting space, especially for ego-type purchases where bloggers buy a copy for themselves.t’ll be about $30 for a four color, 40 page, 8×10 hardcover book with a custom dust jacket.

Kaboodle

I wrote about Kaboodle, a clip service that is really useful for gathering and sharing information on the web, back in October. They launched some incredible new features this week to normalize data across items: search for items, clone/copy a page, find related items, vote on items, etc. They are also allowing users to create profiles to allow more social aspects. A lot of people are finding Kaboodle to be a very useful shopping tool.

Kosmix

Mountain View based Kosmix is a structured search engine with three current verticals: health, politics and travel. More are coming soon. Instead of showing linear, Google-like results, Kosmix is categorizing results to create a taxonomy. They claim their engine can be used to create good results over almost any topic area. This is one to watch and I’ll be doing a full profile on them soon.

Krugle

Fred Wilson wrote about Krugle today as well, saying “It’s a search engine for open source software. Vertical search for open source. Sounds like a good concept. The demo was simple and the proposition was compelling. Not sure how they make money, but the demo isn’t supposed to focus on that.” Knowing how often developers use search engines to find code snippets, this will be an extremely useful. The company is based in Silicon Valley and Josh Kopelman is an investor.

Plum

Everyone’s buzzing about Plum, a new social bookmarking application with easy tools to turn bookmarked content into blog entries, photo album, feed list, etc.. Full profile coming soon.

Sharpcast

Sharpcast, led by CEO Gibu Thomas, just launched this week as well. It’s an incredibly powerful platform to synchronize data and any application between (certain) mobile devices and the desktop. The photo showcase application is compelling. Look for a full review on MobileCrunch. Sharpcast is funded and has the smell of a company that can go all the way.

Zingee

I finally got a look at newcomer storage service Zingee, which would have been included on my “Online Storage Gang” post if they had been around. Zingee could be serious competition for Omnidrive, with high end sharing features, permanent URLs for files, no file size restrictions (yeah!) and other neat feature. Full profile coming soon.

Lots more companies to write about tomorrow. See Jeff Clavier and Erick Schonfeld for additional profiles.