Late yesterday afternoon UPS showed up with our box of 20 books from blurb.com (affiliate link). Put simply we are impressed. First, the packaging of the Blurb books was professional with each book individually shrink wrapped and then all 20 books neatly stacked in an appropriately sized box with packing material to fill the extra space at the top. Second, my visual assessment of the print quality of the Blurb books is quite favorable. They even made the scans of old pictures look pretty darn good. Third, it’s cool having a coffee table quality book that we produced sitting on our coffee table.
I made a comment in my previous post about the BookSmart software templates used to produce the Blurb books, being somewhat limiting. Earlier this morning I read with great interest a post about the success of a promotional postcard web-to-print company by Adam Dewitz over at PrintCEOBlog.com. Following is a quote from that post :
… In the monograph I present the concept of deterministic print production workflows. These “workflows rely on catalogs of predefined attributes and rules or logic to dictate the design and production of a print product. The limits placed on the design parameters such as paper stock, color versus monochrome printing, bind-ing and finishing methods, and product dimensions allow for highly automated print production systems to be engineered. These turnkey print production systems are highly efficient and require little human intervention. In fact, they might be the ‘Holy Grail’ of computer-integrated manufacturing the print industry is attempting to achieve.”
It appears that this is precisely what PostcardBuilder has done. …
Two comments to finish this post; 1. It appears that is precisely what blurb.com has done as well; 2. It is time to download Adam’s monograph about web-enabled print architectures.