Review of Blurb Book Layflat Photobook

Blurb is a online publishing platform that allows anyone to create, self-publish, share and sell their own prints, wall art, books and ebooks. It’s been a long time since I made a photo book. The last book I made was over a decade ago using Photobook Australia. It was a small square softcover book that I put together after my first trip to Melbourne with friends. Since then I’ve been meaning to make another photobook but haven’t found the time, motivation or the right story to tell. Lightroom has had the book module that integrates with Blurb Books for a long time and it’s always been on the back of my mind to try it out.

This year I finally found the time (a silverlining of the unprecedent lockdown in 2020) and the story to tell. I decided creating a 3 year anniversary photobook as a gift would be the perfect reason to finally make a photobook. It also “forced” me to pick key photos to edit from my very large backlog of travel photos from the last 3 years. It was a big photographic project for me that took me a couple of months to work on during my downtime. I spent a lot of time editing and curating images. Then putting them into a nice sequence of events that tells a story. I ordered it in May and it took around 3 weeks for it to be printed and shipped to Perth.

When I received and unravelled my photobook, it struck me that it might be interesting and fun to write about my process of making the photobook via Lightroom, my review of the Blurb Book publishing processes and what I think about the final product I just received. I’m no expert in printing or photo books, having only made my second photo book recently. So my views are really just off my personal experience of making a photobook. This blog post is not associated with Blurb in any way.

A bit about Blurb Books. They have been around since 2006, founded by a photographer who wanted to make making photobooks simple and affordable. It was at the precipice of the explosion of consumer digital photography. Point and shoot cameras and DSLRs started to get into the hands of everyday people. Since then they have expanded into not just photo books, but wall prints, cook books, travel books, magazines.

Why photobooks? My main interest in photo books is to tell a story. A journey of some sort. In my eyes, they are great for travel adventures, weddings and family story albums. But you can really make a photobook to showcase anything. It could be your portfolio of images to show clients.

What does Blurb offer? After some discussion in the Fuji X Aus Facebook community regarding what companies people have tried to make their photobooks and what people thought about Blurb Books, I decided to give it a go with Blurb.

• They offer 6 sizes from mini square books all the way to large landscape books.
• They also offer 6 different paper types including a thicker layflat paper.
• Lastly you can choose from glossy softcover, hardcover image wrap with matte finish or hardcover dust jacket with a glossy jacket. For layflat books, your only option is the hardcover image wrap with matte finish.

The layflat book is a great option for travel photography where you want to show case landscapes or panoramic scenes that stretch across two pages. As the pages are thicker, it’s also great for books that will be handled often or something that you feel should have a more premium feel to it such as wedding or family albums.

Delivery & packaging. As I was at work when the package was delivered, I popped by the post office to pick up the package on the weekend. Little did I expect such a large box! I’ve included my takeaway coffee for size comparison. It turned out it was 70% bubble wrap. So the photo box was well protected. I’m not sure if I expected the photobook to be shrink-wrapped and stored in a matte white photobook box. Either way, that was a pleasant surprise. And it keeps up with that premium book look.

Pricing. Flatlay books naturally come at a high starting price tag given that it’s selling point is that it’s a more durable and premium product. It does have a 110 page limit though compared to non-layflat books. Layflat books are made with premium lustre ultra-thick paper (432 gsm).

Look & Feel. At first glance, the box itself looks solid and sturdy. However I would say it’s not a high end book box. When you open up the box and leave and let the cover lay flat, the cover of the box does pull on the box a little. The box is held closed with a magnet built into the box. The white fabric pull-tab that you can use to pull open the box is a nice touch though. The photobook is well padded inside the box. Though I feel like the white foamy padding around the photobook makes it lose a bit of the premium look and feel.

Being my first layflat book and first time printing with Blurb I wasn’t sure what to expect. I was pleasantly surprised by the quality and colour reproduction of the images and pages in the book. I don’t use a colour calibrated monitor and I didn’t do anything in particular to edit the images for printing in Lightroom. I very much relied on Blurb to manage my colours. Looking through the pages of the book, in my eyes I feel like the colours turned out exactly as I expected. I had a mix of iPhone photos, Google Pixel 2 phone photos, Fujifilm JPEGs & edited raw files and a few Olympus OMD JPEGs thrown in the mix.

I really like the hardcover matte look. It makes the book look and feel like a premium product. The pages of the book are quite thick and weighty. The pages open up flat quite nicely too without any bending to the page. If I wanted to be really nitpicky, with such a thick book (80 pages!), when I open it up towards the middle of the book, there is a slight stretch/twist to the pages (you can see that in the image below). Nothing that damages the book and probably something that can’t be helped either.

Publishing. I used Lightroom’s book module to create my book. Once I learned the basics on how to use the functions and templates in the book module, I found it was fairly user friendly. Drag and drop your images. It was very easy to reorganise images, change the order of the pages, change the layout of each page etc. Blurb has its own publishing software call Bookwright that is free to download for those who don’t have any dedicated software to design their books. I liked the fact that I can easily go back into my Lightroom library to find out images for my book, rather than having to export a set of images that I might want to use in Bookwright. Once I was ready to hit publish, I clicked on “send book to Blurb”. This took me through a series of steps to order my book. I received an email receipt for my order and a tracking number. I thought it was a fairly simple and straigtht forward process.

Value. I purchased the standard layflat book at Standard Landscape 10×8 inches (25×20 cm) with 80 pages. I also paid the extra to remove the Blurb logo at the end of the book. With the 40% blurb discount at the time, including shipping the photobook came to $151.85. Not a bad price for the final outcome. A bit of a tip, if you sign up to the Blurb newsletter, you’ll be notified of any offers and discounts. Since signing up there has been a number of great offers, 40% has been the biggest I’ve personally seen so far. If you’re interested on printing a photobook, download the Bookwright app from Blurb or use Lightroom to get your book ready. Once you see an an attractive offer, go ahead and get your book made.

A few handy hints I learned during this book making process.

1. It feels like an overwhelming project especially when you have thousands of photos. I found finding a specific purpose and focus for the photobook to be helpful in narrowing down your photos to be included in the book. It also helped you focus on the story telling aspect – consider telling the story thematically or chronologically.
2. I did my photo curation in two passes. In my first pass, I selected around 800 images that are potentials to be included in the photo book (out of thousands of photos). My second pass was done during my book-building process. As I created my page layouts I would pick out images that best fit the page layout and told the story. I probably ended up with a couple of hundred photos over the 80 pages.
3. Last but not least, done is better than perfect! When you receive your book and open it up, any doubts or minor flaws you think you had is unimportant. Having a coffee table book that you can flick through anytime without turning on the computer is quite liberating. It’s also a form of backup if all your digital backups fail 🙂
4. Don’t worry if you include photos from your phone. Phones these days are pretty amazing, producing some great images. I found I included quite a few memorable and important photos from my phone into the photobook that helped tell the story. Sure it might not have the creamy bokeh or might look slightly grainy. But at the end of that day, that doesn’t matter as much as the story.
5. Keep organised regularly. Because I already had a pretty organised Lightroom catalogue (by year and dates/months, with a bit of a description of the folder), I didn’t find it too hard to find photos I wanted to include. As I was telling a story chronologically, the way I organised my photos in Lightroom really helped.
6. Blurb discounts come up pretty regularly (as I mentioned above), so feel free to get your book ready and wait for a sale.
7. Last but not least, have some fun with it. Making a photobook book should be fun. It should bring back memories and help you see how your photography has grown over time.

If you got to this point of the blog post, well done! This turned out to be one giant post. I hope you have found this insightful and may be it has inspired you to create your own book. Whether it be with Blurb or any other company.

Thanks for stopping by today.

Your friend Janice.