I have been experimenting with Blurb’s service and their publishing tool, called BookSmart. It allows you to arrange your photos and create your book in a user-friendly way. However, it is not a desktop publishing (DTP) tool, like Adobe InDesign or Microsoft Publisher. While it is very convenient, it is also limited. There were a few points I struggled with:
- Layout options are limited. There is a large set of layouts to choose from, but that’s it. I don’t think you can define your own layout.
Page flow is not clear. If you copy-and-paste a large chunk of text, BookSmart will intelligently add pages with the same layout for you. It will also link those pages, so if you remove a few lines here and there, the text will autofill. However, at times those links get severed and this auto-layout no longer works. Sometimes you want to remove the link, but there’s no clear way to do it. I remember most DTP programs have a little icon that showed the link, and you could delete that. I couldn’t find anything like that in BookSmart. In the end, I cut op my book in small chapters, so that the autolayout could work on the chapter, but not on the whole book. That turned out to work pretty well.- When I did use pages with multiple text windows and changed the layout, it tended to just drop the text, which was probably the most annoying bit. There is an undo function, but if you don’t notice it right away, you might end up loosing important bits. I would suggest to author and store the text in another program and copy-and-paste it into BookSmart as needed.
- Related to the previous point: Always work from front to back. If you change something in the first pages of the book, you risk messing up the layout of those that come behind.
- In general: If you will only be publishing pictures, with very little text, I think BookSmart will be more than enough for your needs. As soon as you want to add more text (I’d say my case was 50% pictures, 50% text) it gets more complicated. The text editing tools are limited, for instance, there is no “justify” alignments options, that neatly fills the entire line.
In spite of those negative points. I must say, BookSmart was a truly user-friendly tool, that any one can just pick up and use. I got friendly warnings when I did stuff that might impact my book. The most important warning was when I used pictures with too low resolution. It’s also nicely integrated with the ordering process. And it’s free. So try it out before you go look for much much more expensive alternatives (I don’t know any DTP program that’s both affordable and any good). If you should decide to not use BookSmart, be warned that you will need to jump a number of hoops.