Blurb Books

Starting with the entries for 2009 and 2010, I have created a professionally-bound volume for each year's blog posts. The service that I used is called Blurb (blurb.com), and it has free publishing software that lets you scoop up all the content from your posts and then tweak the formatting for printing.

The 100-page book that I published for 2009 is quite nice, but I was still learning how to make the best use of the pages back then, the pictures ended up small (default size) and there were quite a few pages with short amount of text at the top and blank space the rest of the way down -- not the best use of the page.



The 2010 book is much better. It's also much longer. I went right up to the maximum page count for a hardcover book (160 pages) and made sure that I used really big pictures as much as possible, which was a long process.

The software usually renders the pictures in a very small size, leaving lots of room for text. I found that I had to reformat every page in the book to make the pictures larger -- sometimes dedicating a whole page to one photo (which the software would never do). And that's the other problem: Although the software pulls down a copy of each photo, it just takes it as it appears on the website, and that usually isn't at a good resolution for printing. So I had to go in and replace the web versions of the photos with the original images to ensure the best print quality.

It takes a long time to prep each book, but it's totally worth it. I had two copies printed, one for each of the kids to keep. Maybe I should have ordered an extra one for us to keep after they grow up, but that is still a ways off and having so many copies around the house seems a bit excessive. Plus the 160-page book normally costs $63 per copy; however, I had a groupon coupon that brought it down to $48. Also, I use the ongoing advertising revenue from the site to offset my printing costs.

I just love these books, and I think the kids will love them too -- once they get old enough to actually touch them. Right now they are off-limits by order of Dad.