Blurb: Fast Pass to the Realm of the Literati

Watch out National Geographic, Smedley’s Amazing Auspicious Adventures in Full-Color is nipping at your heels. You, yes you over there with the dorky photographer’s vest and the bazooka lens…you can publish your own coffee table book for just a little bit more than the price of a pound of Starbuck’s finest.

Blurb, a California startup, has announced its free Booksmart Beta 1.5 (meaning it is close and almost a cigar) software that will allow you to design and publish a 40 page 8x10 softcover photo book for $18.95, or 29.95 for hardcover. $79.95 will get you a whopping 440-page doorstop. There are other companies and photo upload sites doing this, but most are more expensive and the books aren’t nearly as pretty and professional looking.

You just download the Booksmart software from the Blurb web site, install it on your PC or Mac, drag and drop your pictures and type your text into the layout templates, proof it on your printer and send it off. You’ll get your book back in five to six business days.

This isn’t just for digital dilettantes. Consider how much it costs to have prints made of those vacation pictures or the frustration of trying to get the colors to come out right on your paper-munching, ink-slurping printer dragon. Then you have to find an album and a way to affix your pictures to the page. Then, how do you caption them? My dear Aunt Ruth inserted her pictures into little stick-on corners, typed captions with her old Underwood and Scotch Taped them to the pages. Of course the tape yellowed and the pictures always fell out and fluttered around the parlor like magazine blow-ins. As a person who shudders at the thought of scissors and glue pots and Martha Stewarty stuff, I find less sturm und drang in drag and crop than cut and glue.

The software is very intuitive and easy to use. I mastered in minutes but will remain merely a "Blurbarian" at the Gate until I can settle on a theme, what pictures to use, how to describe them, etc. The Blurb tool is simple. Finishing a creative project is hell.