Toronto Photography Meetup Group

Thought that I would update this thread, since I finally received a copy of the book that I've been working on, on and off, for the last 6 months. It only went up on Saturday night and I already have 8 sales.

I'm pretty pleased with the quality as I knew that I would be, having seen Blurb's product before. I certainly learnt a lot in the process too. Next time I'll do things a little differently.

http://www.blurb.com/bookstore/detail/2007619

YOu did a nice job. I like the black background on the pages it works well with the images, contrast. Oh, is that a blurb logo I see on the inside bottom right of the first page ?

Yup, that's the Blurb logo. You have to pay extra for custom logos and I'm trying to keep the cost down, as much as possible. My own logo there was unnecessary, but things like better gloss paper were a must.

I've created a couple of photobooks with MyPublisher. I'm nowhere near pro enough to deal with the colour issues (not to mention that i'm part colourblind), but I found the quality of the paper and book quality in general to be excellent. It looks very much like a professional book you'd find in store.

The reasons i chose MyPublisher over some others:

1. Large size photobook - the format available was bigger than a few of the other places. I mainly do landscape photos, so i was looking for biggest possible.

2. Full bleed - i didn't even know what this meant until i decided to do this, it refers to being able to print photos all the way to the edge of the page, without a frame. Many other companies did not have this option.

3. Wraparound photocover / dust jacket - i liked having this and being able to put several different photos on the this as well as add text.

I've not used mypublisher for a couple of years now and i know they have updated their software, however, here are a couple of downsides i found:

1. Fonts. There were very few fonts and the positioning of text was limited and clunky.

2. Templates. I mostly used single-photo, full-bleed pages, so didn't care about templates, however, when i was fiddling around with it, i found the templates pretty limited, i found myself wishing i could just arrange photos anyway i wanted. This is circumventable by just editing the photos into a collage and using it as full-bleed, but it would be easier if the software was better.

About Their pricing...if you like MyPublisher, sign-up for their mailing list, they will inevitably send you a 50% off or "buy one, get one free" or some other huge discount pretty much right away. The downside is that they'll keep sending you these for the rest of your life, forever making you think that you really should be printing more of your photos instead of being lazy and you'll feel bad that you haven't done it or don't have the time or the money and really it would be nice to have a few more printed books and the coupon is great incentive and... sigh. maybe i'll make another one... soon..

Meeting up to compare photobook printing quality is a good idea.