got my book, heres my comments.....
I received the book on Friday. Unfortunately, FedEx found a way to drop it on one of the corners of the shipping box and really did a number on the spine. I sent an email to Blurb and they responded back within the hour asking for photos. I sent them a photo and they again responded within the hour giving me a prepaid UPS shipping label and letting me know that they were printing up another book. I was impressed with the speed and ease of the communication.
Here are some photos and comments from the book...
Cover - I got the title too close to the top, while the computer view looked ok, I should have dropped it more....my mistake
the paper was nice, not the super expensive stuff that you might see, but a nice semi gloss texture.
The sharper the photo the better it will print up. For all of the photos I went into Photoshop and resized them to 300dpi, necessary for 4 color printing whether a book or a magazine. Each file had a size of between 2 to 7MB.
the red colors on the pages really popped! On one or two pages the red was over whelming (did I just say that?)
You have the option to change the page back ground color, on the page on the left, I just noticed that I had made the page BLACK, I did that when I was putting photos like the one on the right to fill in top and bottom when ever I would shrink the photo to fit the page there would be gaps at the top and bottom, it was easy to over come with black pages, but then I would forget and the result is on the left...
They recommend printing out a sample copy before you order your printed book. Of course I didn't do that. Next time I will. I think that it is one thing to look at each page on the computer and I did do that finding various typo errors that I had made, but I think when you can look at pages and think about it, that you have a different feel and idea about how you want it to turn out.
The back page I used, I forgot to turn the page black, and you can see the outline around the edge of the book. I should have made the page black and then it all would have blended together. I am not sure if printint ahead would have caught this or not.....
I didn't see how to put a title on the edge of the book so it is whilte and left blank. Next time I will get the sorted out and fixed.
All in all, it is a good service. Not very hard to do and their software makes it pretty easy. I will use them again. Maybe next time I will try the regular paper rather than the premium paper and see how that turns out. It costs less and you can put more pages in the book (over 400 versus 160).
If anyone tries the book route and has questions, I would be glad to share what I know (not usually very much). I will probably make some vacation books since we do a lot of travel and Sharon often complains that she doesn't see all the photos that we take.
Good luck!
Jane Ann
puke)......
otfl
