It’s Friday night so no work stuff in this post. I want to share the word on one of my favorite tools, Blurb.com. This online service lets you make your own bookstore quality books. It has a downloadable layout tool that uploads your design and content and bada bing, 7-10 days later real books shows up at your door.

I’ve just finished publishing my 5th Blurb book (30 pages for $13). For me it’s all about photos. I really enjoy digital photography and when I sit down to actually do a project, it’s quite fun. Blurb has polished its feature set quite well over the last year. They have kept the interface clean and simple. I’d go as far as to say its fool proof. It is a template driven design, which annoys my bit-twiddler nature, but there is a wide variety of page layouts to choose from so I’m OK with it. I always choose the darkroom template with the slick black background because it looks classy and gets oooohs and ahhhs from friends.

My books are just for friends and family, but Blurb supports a marketplace. For example, my friend Ricco just published a coffee table book of his paintings (Of Dreams and Shadows), you can preview his book online, heck you can even buy if you want.

Speaking of friends and family, the gift giving season is coming. Instead of spending money on crap they don’t really want, why not stay up late one night and make a book of your best iPhone pics and your best twitters over the last year. You save money, they will laugh, and you don’t have to leave the house.

This entry was posted on Saturday, October 18th, 2008 at 1:32 am and is filed under LiquidPlanner, Tools, web based software. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.