Book Reviews

 a little lagniappe for 2006, 2008, and 2011

I've had a few people ask about the blog books that I've printed out, and I thought there might be others interested in a little side by side comparison as well, so I figured I'd do a full-out book review for everyone to enjoy!   Because blogging about my blog books would be TOO existential an opportunity to pass up.  Hahaha.  Having used both Blurb and Blog2print, I'll give some pros and cons of each, and what I ultimately have decided regarding the two.

Up first?  BLURB.  If only because that was the first platform I used.

 Our 2006 yearbook was printed by Blurb, and as you can see measures a bit smaller than the Blog2pint at 7.75x9.75 compared to 8.5x11.

Standard Paper Hardcover with dust jacket -- $29.99 for first 20 pages; $0.25 for each additional page.
Standard Paper Hardcover with image wrap -- $31.99 for first 20 pages; $0.25 for each additional page.

PROS:

• The finished product looks pretty awesome.  
• The books are highly customizable and you can format them to look the way you want.
• The price is competitive with other companies. 

 Here's a peak into a Blurb book.  As you can see, I was able to put the pictures where I wanted them and to size them the way I wanted them as well.

 Another example of picture placement and sizing.

CONS:

• OH MY GOODNESS TIME CONSUMING for all that formatting.
• You have to download Booksmart through Blurb's website to do all the editing.
• There is no way to slurp your blog exactly with the format it has online into the software.
• Booksmart is SLOOOOOOOOOW on my computer.  
• Did I mention it was time consuming????
• If you simply slurp your blog from the URL into Booksmart, all the text for each post will be put together and any pictures that were in the post will be inserted in a clump at the end of the post.  Or maybe as thumbnail pictures along the sides. Like I said -- it does not preserve the online look at all.
• You CAN go post by post to create a format that you like, but it still won't be exactly how it was when you blogged it, and there are only so many pre-set page formats for you to use. 
• It took HOURS and HOURS to finally get one book ready to go to print.

Up next? BLOG2PRINT.

Standard Hardcover (picture printed directly on covers) -- $24.95 for first 20 pages; $0.35 for each additional page.
Deluxe Hardcover (with dust jacket) -- $29.97 for first 20 pages; $0.35 for each additional page.

PROS:

• You can import your blog in exactly the same form (for the most part) into Blog2print.  In other words, the online look is preserved as far as the order of things such as text, pictures, and captions.
• The price is competitive.
• SOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO much quicker.
• There are 15% off coupons floating around all the time.

 Sneak peek into a Blog2print book.  You can see here how the format resembles the format of the blog post online.

CONS:

• There isn't much customization available.  You can basically choose what dates you want imported, what size you want the pictures to be, and what cover you would like to use.
• All the pictures are the same size, and there isn't much efficiency in page usage as the text and pictures are slurped.
• The quality of the paper and pictures is slightly less than Blurb, but it's not terrible.
• When a blog post has multiple pictures in a row with no captions or text between them, they get clumped together. 
• Captions are not centered under the pictures -- this is one of the weirder quirks to me, because the pictures are mostly centered.
• The Standard and the Deluxe versions seem to be mixed up in my opinion.  The Deluxe with the dust jacket has just a plain black cloth cover under the dust jacket -- which doesn't look very nice, and dust jackets plus children equals lots of rips, so going with the cheaper, image-printed-on-the-cover Standard version is the much better bet as far as I'm concerned.

 Another example.  You can kind of see the issue with the photo clumping and non-centered caption under Sophie's birthday picture.

Lots and lots of pictures.  All of which I wish were larger, but there's no way to re-size select pictures.

Black book under dust jacket equals BLAH.

A SUMMATION:

After printing the first two years (2006 & 2007) in Blurb,  I took a LOOOOOOONG hiatus from any kind of blog printing because it totally burned me out.  It took SOOOO much time to format each and every page of every post that I eventually decided it wasn't worth it and there had to be a better way.  A couple of years ago, I decided to give Blog2print a shot, and even though the product is definitely not perfect, it is SOOOOOOO much easier to create, that I'm fine with using it for the rest of our books. 

In fact, seeing the kids so enthralled with the ones we have (2006-2011), motivated me to finally order the books for 2012 and 2013. Having a printed -- if imperfect-looking -- record of our family is definitely worth it.  And even though the Blurb books certainly look nicer, the ONLY way I would ever go back to using them would be if they changed the software to allow you to transport your blog exactly how it looks online into a book format, and run a whole lot faster while you do it.  So, there you have it.  Another partial and biased product review from moi.  :)