Our friends at Viator are hosting a contest for a free vacation to Paris or Amsterdam. Along with 2 free airline tickets, you’ll be eligible for a $200 Viator gift certificate, a Frommers Day by Day Paris (or Amsterdam) guide book, and a $150 Blurb gift card.
You don’t have to buy anything to be eligible to win. Simply enter your name and email address here by January 16th, and you’ll be in the running.
Good luck!
Join us and some experienced designers for an intro to BlurbNation and how to start your own book designing business. We’ll show you how BlurbNation members are developing their businesses, the types of projects they’re working on, and how Blurb supports them through BlurbNation. We’ll also have lots of Blurb books made by BlurbNation members for you to check out for inspiration.
When: Thursday, January 8th, 5 pm to 6:30 pm
Where: Thirsty Bear Brewing Company
661 Howard Street (between Second and Third St.)
San Francisco, CA 94105
Register here: http://blurbnation.eventbrite.com
Choosing which font to use in your book in no easy task. Typing a line of text and testing it in each typeface is well, more time consuming then anyone really has time for. If you want to get a quick view of what a block of text will look like, especially for the title on the cover of your book, check out flipping typical.
You enter a word, or little line of text at the top, and it displays what it would look like in the fonts you have on your machine. A small caveat, it may not grab every font you have available and it won’t tell you which to choose, but it will help in determining if a serif or sans-serif is better. Or if you should go for a bold or a slim typeface. You get the idea.
(via swissmiss)
Going to Macworld this week? Come say hi to the Blurb crew! We’ll be at booth 3415 with books, books, and more books. Come check out our premium paper, all our trim sizes and meet a bunch of us. We’ll also have all you need to know about BlurbNation and will even be hosting a BlurbNation event at the Thirsty Bear on Thursday from 5 - 6.30 pm - stop by for details!
The last week of 2008 had some pretty spectacular books (check out some of our favorites), but Homeland Security by Michele Pred took the cake.
Michele, a local, yet internationally renowned conceptional artist, created a book to catalogue the artwork from her Homeland Security series. The collection consists of pieces made from confiscated items at the San Francisco International Airport over the course of 6 years and are so cool, you will likely want to dig through those bins to see what you can assemble yourself.
Check out the preview of the book here and learn more about Michele, her work and her upcoming exhibitions on her site.
Seasons Greetings Fellow Blurberati,
Those of you who have not been following the mainstream book publishing business may be unaware that the industry has been hit hard in recent weeks.
Wednesday, 3 December has become known as Black Wednesday as Random House folded five divisions into three, eliminating the jobs of two top editors (with more layoffs likely to follow), Simon and Schuster laid off 35 people, Thomas Nelson (religious publishing powerhouse) laid off 10% of their workforce, and Penguin announced widespread pay freezes. And all this was on top of the previous weeks’ news that Houghton Mifflin was no longer accepting any new submissions.
But while I feel terrible for those who have lost their jobs, this story does have a remarkably positive ending, so please read on.
Sara Nelson, Editor in Chief of Publisher’s Weekly, had this to say about Black Wednesday, ” But I don’t really worry, in the long run, about publishing itself. Because if there’s one thing that history has shown it is that when the dust settles – and it will settle– there have always been stories, people to read them, and people to produce and disseminate them. Whether those stories (and people) will be part of large corporations, whether the stories will be measured in pages or bytes, and whether there will be hundreds of thousands of them produced every year—well, that we’ll have to see.”
So here’s the good news I promised earlier. The answer is already hundreds of thousands. Books, that is. And that’s just Blurb’s contribution.
While mainstream publishing is indeed undergoing painful changes, the personal publishing business is exploding. Before the year is out — and in only our second full year of product availability, Blurb will have produced over 750,000 books. We have written checks in excess of $300,000 to those of you who elected to sell your books for profit in the blurb.com bookstore this year alone — and nearly three quarters of a million people have downloaded Blurb’s BookSmart software in total.
During our peak week this holiday season we were seeing a new book title come in every three seconds. Many of these books are personal books — but increasingly, we are seeing folks previously published the old-fashioned way make their way over to Blurb.
We are particularly proud that Rick Smolan, the former Time/Life photographer and noted book author (America 24/7 sold in the hundreds of thousands of copies) chose Blurb to publish Natasha’s Story, a personal project he started more than 30 years ago; it is now a book of great beauty and grace.
So, I think Sara Nelson is right. Stories will be told and companies (like ours) will be there to assure they get produced and shared. In huge numbers. Globally.
Created by you.
Happy New Year everyone!
All best,
Eileen
Ever think about all the books that could be? There are all the books you could make, or books you think your friends should make, or that one persons life that would make a great book.
The Library of Unwritten Books is like a collective of all those books that could exist, but don’t quite yet. Short interviews were done with people about books they would like to make (or were in the process of making) and the transcripts were published in limited edition mini books.
The touring book-box, aka the Library of Unwritten Books, brings the mini books to towns far and wide, on display at pubs, libraries and even launderettes.
Find out more about the history of the Library of Unwritten Books and join their book club here.