My Blurb Book Review

So I received my first Blurb book yesterday after months and months of photo editing, indesign and final assembly work.  For the most part I am happy.  There are a few things that could have been produced better both on my part (well one thing) and the printers part.

First here is my front cover.  Looks nice, Blacks are not as true black as they should be, but I suspect that is just the nature of the HP Indigo 5000.  Also the imagewrap is a little to mat for my liking, it picks up finger prints and oils way to easy, I am going to see if there is a way to treat this with some sort of clear coat to stop that.

And here is the back cover.  You will notice that my logo unfortunatly starts to wrap around the edge of the book.  I thought I had given it enough space for the image wrap process but it seems that I was just short which is really unfortunate, because even with the other issues that I have which you will read later on, this is the one problem that really gets to me because I could deal with the other things and still have a book that I would rate 8 out of 10.

If you look at this closeup of the spine of the book, which has only opened a handful of times you will see a crease/cracking has already formed in the spine grove, should this be happening? I don’t think it should and I believe that it is a product of the stock that the imagewrap is printed on, I have recently purchased several imagewrap style books that have been traditionally published and this has not happened to them.

Now for the inside of the book.  Lets start with the positives.  The premium is a very nice weight mat paper.  It is by no means a semi-mat, semi-gloss, gloss, pearl, or luster, but nice none the less.  Black and white images look outstanding on it.  The color is good, there is no color cast to any of the images like others have complained about, although again due to it being a 4-color offset print and not an RGB print there is a lot of vibrancy that is lost in the images.  Here is one of the spreads.  Notice the background color of the pages and then look at the next image which is from the PDF version of my book the way the background color shood look.  Its not the end of the world but it is something that I will have to work on with Blurb or whatever company I try for my next book.

The Digital File

In the following images take note of the binding.  While it appears to actually be stitched, its not totally straight from top to bottom, its off just a little but enough to notice.  Also a very slight white edge was left on the binding edge instead of it being trimmed to the page edge and this can be seen clearly, it can be extremely annoying and distracting particularly on double spread images.

White edge on binding:

Double Spread Image:

So while the overall quality is good there are a few small changes that could make this a great book.  I would give an overall of 7 of 10 for my first Blurb experience.  So for any Blurb people reading this seriously conisider working with your printers on these problems and you have a superior product.

One last thing,  the book arrive bubble wrapped in a properly secured cardboard box so there was no corner denting as mention by other blurb customers.