(Way) Beyond iPhoto: Making Books with Blurb

Posted Monday, November 13, 2006

How would you like to be able to produce a beautiful hard-bound book on your Mac? Imagine being able to choose a design template, drag photos into position, add text, tweak formatting, then click a button and have your design transferred over the Internet and your book delivered to your doorstep a short time later.

With Blurb.com and its free BookSmart layout software, you can do exactly that.

"But Jim," you protest, "you of all people know that iPhoto has allowed you to do the same things since shortly after the turn of the century."

Indeed it has. But there are differences with Blurb. For starters, the company's BookSmart software (available for Windows and Mac OS X) has far more powerful text-handling features. Pour in lengthy passages of text, and BookSmart automatically flows it across multiple columns and multiple pages. Specify chapter titles, and BookSmart gives you headers at the top of each page. BookSmart will even generate a table of contents for you. A future version—the current release is still in beta form—will even generate an index for you. Oh, and a Blurb book can have up to 440 pages.

If iPhoto and Adobe InDesign met at a library and fell in love, BookSmart might be their offspring.

And Amazon.com might be their godparent. Blurb.com not only lets you design and order books, it lets you sell them, too. When you create a book using Blurb.com, you get an online storefront that lets you sell the book.

Intrigued yet? Listen up. Last Wednesday night on Point & Click Radio, the biweekly radio show that I cohost with my friend Bob Laughton, we interviewed a Blurbarian—that's Blurb lingo for "customer."

We talked to Nicholas Wilson, a photographer who is using BookSmart and Blurb.com to produce a book called Mendocino in the Seventies: People, Places and Events of California's Mendocino Coast.

We also talked to Eileen Gittins, CEO of Blurb.com, about her company's origins and future. The San Francisco-based startup has been making news lately, and it's easy to see why.

The interview portion of our show is available for your MP3 downloading pleasure. Grab it now (12MB MP3 file).

A Few More Words About BookSmart
If you've made a book in iPhoto, many aspects of Blurb.com's free BookSmart software will feel familiar to you. But you'll immediately notice some differences, starting with fewer book size options: currently, Blurb.com provides only an 8 by 10 inch (landscape or portrait orientation) size.

But on the plus side, Blurb.com's hardbound books include a laminated paper dust jacket, complete with flaps where you place photos and text. Each design template provides far more formatting options than iPhoto's templates. And while I've noticed numerous rough edges in now the beta version of BookSmart handles text, it's still easier to work with than it is in iPhoto.

There's one more serious limitation: you can't directly access your iPhoto library. To add photos to a book, you must first add them to BookSmart. A future version of BookSmart will provide direct iPhoto library access, according to Blurb.com.

From Blogs to Books
Blurb.com is tapping into the Web 2.0 scene in a couple of intriguing ways. Currently in testing are two features aimed at bloggers and Flickr addicts. With Blog Books, Blurb.com will turn a blog into a book: the company's Blog Slurper will extract text and photos from popular blogging services such as TypePad, and insert them directly into book templates.

A similar service is in development for Flickr: Blurb.com will extract high-resolution versions of your Flickr photos, and optionally include your captions as well as comments left by Flickr members. As a rabid Flickr addict, I can't wait to try this one.

How Do They Look?
And how do the printed books look? Blurb.com's printing contractors use the same Hewlett-Packard Indigo presses that are used to print Apple's iPhoto books, so generally, they look about the same.

I've seen only a couple of samples, however, so I'm not prepared to issue an authoritative opinion on print quality. See for yourself: for US$14.95, you can order How To Make a Book, a 39-page book produced by Blurb.com using BookSmart. It's a helpful guide and a great example of what you can do with BookSmart. And it includes a US$10 coupon that you can apply to your next book.

One to Watch
Listen to our radio interviews, download BookSmart, try it out, and poke around on Blurb.com's friendly and engaging Web site. Browse the book store to see what other Blurbarians have already created.

There's a lot to like here, and I look forward to seeing how the software and the company evolve in the months to come.

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iTunes 7 and Cover Art: Tips and Speculation

Posted Monday, November 06, 2006

I love iTunes 7's Cover Flow view, which lets you "paw through" your music collection in much the same way you could paw through the albums in a record store. (Kids: If you don't know what the last part of the previous sentence means, ask your parents.) Indeed, I like the Cover Flow view so much that I wish Apple would add an option for viewing it in full-screen mode.

I also like that iTunes 7 can retrieve artwork for songs that are already in your library: just choose Advanced > Get Album Artwork. But there's a big catch: iTunes retrieves artwork for only those songs that Apple sells in the iTunes Store. If your music library is like mine, you're likely to have a lot of generic album covers in your Cover Flow display. There's still a place for third-party artwork utilities or good, old-fashioned Google image searching.

(Tip: You can enlarge the Cover Flow display by dragging the resize area just below the Cover Flow scroll bar. To page through covers, press the arrow keys on your keyboard.)

Beginning with iTunes 7, though, the way cover artwork is stored can differ depending on how and where you got the artwork. The key difference occurs when you retrieve artwork for songs already in your library. Rather than storing the artwork in the music files themselves—which is how iTunes and other music jukebox software have always worked—iTunes 7 stores the art in a separate database.

One complication of this surfaces if you move a song file from one computer to another. When the artwork is embedded in the file—as it still is with purchased music in iTunes 7—the artwork travels along with the file. But with songs whose art you've retrieved using the Get Album Artwork command, the art and the music are two separate beasts: move the song, lose the art.

There's more to this than I've described here, and there are workarounds. The intrepid iTunes investigators over at iLounge have put together an excellent guide.

But this change begs the question: Why? Why divorce art and music? Why diverge from standards that have served the digital music scene well for many years now?

My guess: copyright.

Album artwork is protected by copyright, and Apple's legal brigade may have felt that it isn't appropriate for iTunes to be embedding copyrighted artwork in files that may have originated from, shall we say, other sources.

Anyone have any other ideas? Can there be a good technical reason why retrieved artwork isn't embedded in the music files, where it belongs? Better performance might be a reasonable excuse, but CoverFlow seems to work just fine with artwork that's embedded in the file, too.

I am, as Ross Perot once said, all ears.

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