Gifts for Travelers: Blurb for the Holidays

Today starts my annual Gifts for Travelers series.  No matter which holidays you may celebrate, you should find something over the next few weeks that will be perfect for the travelers on your gift list. 

These are all products that I already enjoy, or would love to receive, so you can consider them coming with the Flyaway Cafe Stamp of Satisfaction!

To start off the giving season, I’m excited to tell you all about Blurb.   I had never heard of the company, but received an invitation to check them out, and give their product a try.

Blurb is a service that allows you to create bookstore-quality books, using your own photographs and journaling.  It sounded cool, but I was a little skeptical.  The samples looked attractive, but could I really come up with something that looked that good?

To start things off you need some downloadable software and some photos.  Blurb takes care of the first with Booksmart, downloadable at their site.  For the photos — you’re on your own.

I approached the project with photos that I had taken on my trip to Paris.  After taking care of all the cropping and editing of the photos, I downloaded Booksmart and then uploaded the photos in the program.  So far, so good.  Nothing too complicated, and nothing that I could really mess up.

Next up begins the process of choosing photographs, design, layout, style, and all those things that make a book so professional looking, but can be tedious when trying to decide.  I decided that I wanted a book primarily of photos, little journaling, mostly just captions and a few comments.

With that in mind, I started the process, just working step-by-step as the program took me through the varying steps.  It’s a fairly intuitive process, allowing you to pick and choose various formats and layouts as you go along.  If you don’t like what you see, just choose another. . . or another. . . or another until you’re satisfied. 

A few options that Blurb offers, in addition to the various photo-layout tools that I mentioned, are a variety of fonts sizes, design elements (backgrounds, ornaments and borders), and the ability to import photos by uploading from your computer, or via photo sharing sites (flickr, Picassa, etc.).

Blurb books come in a variety of sizes, allowing you to pick the size that best fits your project, and hard cover or soft cover.  You can choose from 20 to 440 pages.  I chose a 13″ x 11″, hardback, 20 page book.  A coffee-table sized photo book, titled “Flyaway Cafe Goes to Paris” (in photo at left).

Prices start at $12.95, and are based on size, type of cover, number of pages, quantity ordered, and then there are a variety of shipping charges. 

You also have the ability to make your book available for purchase by other people, setting the price so that you can make a little profit.  This could make a nice fundraiser for groups with a built in customer base.

There were a couple little annoyances that I found during the process.  Nothing that caused me not to persevere with process, but a couple of “damn its” passed by lips.  One of the most annoying issues was that there was no way to save a default font of my choosing.  That would have saved me a lot of time, as I did not want the default font chosen by the program.

Continue reading about my experience with Blurb

It took me a long time to layout my book.  Fortunately, it’s not something that has to be done in one sitting, as it saves as you work along.  I spent a lot of time trying out all the features, partly to see how they worked, and partly because I kept changing my mind about what I wanted.

And here’s a very important detail — At no time did I ever lose, inadvertently delete, or otherwise mess up what I had done.  I changed my mind several times, but never did I mess up so badly that I had to delete and start over.  And that says a lot for the simplicity of the process.

Eventually, I had to finish up the book and let it go.  Otherwise, I’d still be changing and tweaking today!  So I pressed order. . . and waited for the book to arrive.  I didn’t have to wait very long, because once I was finished I was so impatient that I chose to use 2-day delivery!

When the book arrived in the mail, I was a little nervous about opening it up.  But, I did, and WOW!  There was the story of my trip to Paris in a beautiful book that I could look at, share with others, and by looking at it, re-live my experiences.

I showed it to friends and co-workers.  They loved it!  They wanted to make books of their own.  They talked about doing books about their vacations, or family books that could be given to everyone in the family, or books for each school of year their children.

Now that I see the finished product, there are things that I’d do differently.  I’d add more pages and photos.  I’d probably add a little journaling — not much, but a little something to add some back story to the photos.  But other than that, there’s not much I’d change.  (Okay, I’d like to improve my photos, but that’s not something that the Blurb folks are going to be able to help me with.)  I know that some of the other Travel & Culture bloggers were considering making Blurb books, so I’m anxious to see what their’s look like.  For another reivew of the process and end product, you can read what Jon at The DC Traveler has to say.

Me?  As I sit in Hawaii right now typing this, I’m already planning on “Flyaway Cafe Goes to Waikiki.”

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