Why you shouldn’t use blurb.com to produce your photobooks
Sep 17th, 2009 by Intermanaut
In a nutshell, they’re shit. The software is quite whizzy, and the upload/ordering process straight-forward, but once you’ve done all that things go bad - very quickly.
Blurb has a 30% failure* rate when it comes to providing a product of expected quality. Yup - 30% of the orders it handles result in complaints from customers.
There’s little to no point bothering with the wanky Customer Service process. They proudly boast that they only offer email support so that they can deal with problems faster. That’s clearly bollocks. It can take up to four days to get even the most generic reply (beyond the auto-response), and from then on any response you make is ignored and/or deleted. They even suggest you CC any replies you might make to “photonoreply@blurb.com” - there’s a clue in the email address.
They’ll ask you to take photos, and will even give you advice on how to take them. Genius. People have already figured out how to take photos - they’re getting you to put them in to books for them!
If you’re planning to use Blurb to produce a gift for Great Auntie Edna, whose failing eyesight means that she won’t see how badly the covers are printed, or that the colour cast and graininess varies from page to page, you’ll probably get by. If, on the other hand, you’re planning to sell your books to Joe Public, think carefully of the ramifications for you when Blurb pisses off 30% of your customers.
Problems lie in their quality control. Blurb works with several “print partners” around the world, and, as is obvious, the finishers don’t give a shit. When you’ve got a dusk jacket that’s mis-printed by 50mm, it’s obvious to anyone but the dumbest that there’s a problem. It’s easy to tell that the spine print should be on the spine of the book, not two inches on to the back. Someone is assembling books that are obviously wrong and is still shipping them to you. They don’t care. They don’t consider that someone, you, has spent time & money on producing these pieces, and that without you their jobs are screwed.
Unfortunately, Blurb openly admits that it doesn’t give a shit about quality, instead choosing to post crap and wait for people to complain.
* Failure rate calculation based on a sample of 12 orders.
man - i feel ya…
i found this on a google search, and thought i was reading an old post, but alas, it’s from last week!
i thought that hey had gotten their shit together by now.
shame.