{"id":25058,"date":"2017-10-08T22:01:31","date_gmt":"2017-10-08T14:01:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/?p=25058"},"modified":"2017-10-08T22:01:45","modified_gmt":"2017-10-08T14:01:45","slug":"blurb-vol-8","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/2017\/10\/08\/blurb-vol-8\/","title":{"rendered":"Blurb Vol. 8"},"content":{"rendered":"

Every time I finish a new family photo book and have it sent for printing, I’d tell myself not to wait more than a year before I do a next one. That’s a promise I’ve never been able to keep! I keep procrastinating. The number of photos we take every year, ballpark, is roughly between 8,000 to 9,000. Which means I have, easily, more than enough photos to fill two books a year. The last photo book I put together was almost 3 years ago<\/a> now while Hannah and Peter were five and one year old respectively.<\/p>\n

I did have a few days off work over the last week, so that was about as good a time as any time to put in some serious time to select, touch-up then layout page by page the eighth volume of our series of family photo books. I reckon there are a few more photo book publishers today than there was 3 years ago, but I was glad to see that the provider<\/a> who did my first seven books, is still going on strong and in business, though online reviews no longer seem to heap it with the kind of accolades I remember from years ago. I did a comparative scan of options, including Mixbook<\/a> – what many online reviewers regard as the best all-round publisher at the moment – and concluded that Blurb remained my best option, on account of the sheer flexibility of their layout software. And while their best paper options do drive up prices a lot, Blurb offers substantial periodic discounts of 30% on photo book prints.<\/p>\n

The Blurb software though is a very different matter: it’s a new program called BookWright now which I feel is a mix bag compared to the old BookSmart software I used in the earlier books. On the upside, BookWright is a lot more stable – BookSmart crashed on me several times – and it’s also now easier to fix layout issues, for example, best placements of images inside layout containers. On the other hand, the new software seems to have lost a few things compared to the old one: I couldn’t find options to sort images by date taken – a feature that really helps one organize images for chronological placement – and I was also unable to resize the software’s UI panels, which would have made collating information for the book’s metadata section a lot easier.<\/p>\n

The old book also had 346 photos spread across 214 pages – 1.61 photos per page. This new book has 442 across 240 pages – 1.84 photos per page – and the number of pages was the absolute maximum I could go up to with the best paper option selected (ProLine Pearl Photo). This was made possible through two ways: reducing the amount of text in the new book: in the previous books, I typically set aside about 10% of the book space for our key blog entries. Secondly, using a very large number of multi-image pages. And even with these pretty extreme measures, I was unable to squeeze selections from all 3 years’ photos, and managed just up till our June trip this year to Western Australia before I hit my absolute page limit of 240.<\/p>\n

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Vita Una Vol. 8, titled Family of Four.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The printing options I selected for Vol. 8 were the same as the previous books: Hardcover, Dust Jacket, Standard Landscape 10×8 inches (25×20 cm) , 240 pages Standard Mid-Grey End Sheet Standard Black Linen, and on ProLine Pearl Photo Paper. The cost of printing two books, including shipping, was about USD350. Ouch! But with the 30% discount applied, the final cost was brought down to USD249. Surprisingly slightly cheaper than the thinner Vol. 7’s cost of USD263 from three years ago.<\/p>\n

The two books are currently in printing stage now, with a targeted delivery date of 17 Oct or earlier. So, more on this soon enough!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Every time I finish a new family photo book and have it sent for printing, I’d tell myself not to wait more than a year before I do a next one. That’s a promise I’ve never been able to keep!<\/p>\n

Read More Blurb Vol. 8<\/span><\/a><\/div>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":25059,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,7],"tags":[474],"class_list":["post-25058","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-books","category-children-blues","tag-blurb","wpcat-8-id","wpcat-7-id"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/10\/blog-blurb-vol8.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25058","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=25058"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25058\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/25059"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=25058"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=25058"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=25058"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}