Tuesday 10 July 2007

You Too Can Be Published!


I am not in the habit of endorsing products here, but there is an internet service that I just recently used with which I am totally impressed.

A friend of mine, Dave Logan, showed me a couple of coffee table style books which contained pictures of his winter stay in Florida . These were hard covered books complete with cover and very glossy pages with the images and text laid out in a number of interesting, eye-catching formats and all put together by his wife, Carol. It was all done over the internet. I was immediately interested – Dave just knew I would be.

I just had to try it!

I went to the site and downloaded their free software called “BookSmart” which allowed me to put together my own publication, which in my case was a wedding album. BookSmart is very easy to use and presented me with a number of options to make my book just as I wanted it. With the help of Adobe Photoshop, I was able to incorporate text and layouts that were not available in BookSmart. The only limitation was my imagination.

Once I had the book as I wanted it, the ordering process was easy and in BookSmart, my album was uploaded to the publisher. As I was using high resolution images, this took some time but occurred without problems. My book arrived in about 2 weeks. It was expensive ($85 with all costs included), but the product just blew me away. The quality of my book is excellent. The binding and image reproduction is like something you would expect from Time/Life books.

So, where was all this done? The site is:

http://www.blurb.com/

Were anyone can publish a book . . . even me. Thank-you Dave and Carol for showing me this.

Incidentally, here is a preview of the first 16 pages of my book on the Blurb site:

MY BOOK

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