3. Blurb

Like Picaboo, Blurb is a client-based book application. Its software is called BookSmart. Blurb offers software that will work on both Mac and PC (Picaboo is Windows only).

The first thing you must decide when you run Blurb Booksmart is how big your book will be. Unlike Picaboo, you must pick your book size at the beginning of the process.

In keeping with the review methodology started with Picaboo, we selected the smallest size — in this case 7x7.

You can load images into BookSmart from a variety of locations besides your desktop. BookSmart can automatically pull in photos from iPhoto, Flickr, Picasa Web Albums and SmugMug.

Blurb offers 12 different starter layouts: portfolio, photo book, wedding, guestbook, cookbook, yearbook, journal, text and photos, text only, poetry, blog to book and blank.

After you choose the layout you choose a theme. This is a little confusing — it might have made more sense for the starter layout to dictate the theme.

<11image.blurb. theme>

Once you overcome the layout and theme confusion, Blurb throws another curve ball at you by making you choose your cover design. Perhaps Blurb figures users will judge books by their covers? Each cover is a full image, and not an image peek-through.

After the cover the process comes the standard selecting page of layouts and dragging and dropping images.

In terms of photo editing tools, Blurb is relatively limited. It includes rotation, zoom and crop, but no image enhancement capabilities. So, you’d better have your best photos ready to go because you’re not going be able to improve them inside of Blurb.

The strangest aspect of Blurb has to do with the company’s branding. Blurb has default logos inside each book that you can’t easily delete. As such, you will have a Blurb logo on the inside cover unless you pay extra to remove it. For hardcover books, it costs an extra $5 and on soft cover an extra $3 to be rid of the extra Blurb logo.

The final book that we ordered was a 7x7-incher with 30 pages (this size maxes out at 40 pages) with a soft cover for $12.95.

From order confirmation to ship confirmation, it took approximately 76 hours.

The final printed Blurb photo book stood out against the one from Picaboo. Blurb’s had a full color glossy cover at this cheap-and- small price and size (Picaboo in comparison offers only a cover image cutout). The cover’s cardstock was also a heavier weight than the one from Picaboo, giving the Blurb book a more substantive feel. Image brightness could have been a little better, which would have provided improved color contrast. The images are not quite washed out — they’re just a little less vibrant then they could be.