We’re happy to announce the latest release of BookSmart — version 1.7 — affectionately called Black Sabbath within our offices. This version is packed with new features and performs better than ever. It’s hard to know where to start talking up the new features because this is our biggest release since our BookSmart’s inception.
Let’s go with the new trim sizes. You can now make 13×11 hardcover books, and 7×7 softcover and hardcover books. That gives you – including our current standard landscape and portrait sizes – four trim sizes to choose from. You can check out the new templates and layouts in BookSmart’s enhanced New Book Wizard or on our Explore page.
Those of you who visited us at Macworld in San Francisco or Imaging USA in San Antonio know that we now offer iPhoto integration. That means that you have access to all your iPhoto rolls and albums from inside the BookSmart application. Just drag and drop into your new book. Seamless and very cool!
Our blog-to-book slurper has amassed quite a buzz in the blogosphere, so in addition to supporting Typepad and WordPress.com we now also support Blogger and LiveJournal. Bloggers — stay tuned for more blogger app updates!
Many of you have requested more tools to format text and we’ve listened. Your wish is our command. This release introduces support for justification, smart quotes, and linespacing. Nothing should stop you from making that cool textbook. Text editing is an area that we’ll keep improving on and building out during the next few months months.
In addition to the above, our main focus has been to increase the performance of the application. We want to make it snappier, easier, and even more fun to use. Creating your own book is as creative as it gets so we want your experience via Blurb to to be awesomely great.
As always, we’d like to hear from you so leave comments below or post them to our suggestion box.
Have fun with our new trim sizes!
The Product Development Team
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9 Comments
Greetings Blurberati!
I’m so pleased about the new Landscape-format 11″ x 13″ trim size! And am *breathlessly* waiting/wanting to know: what :exact: measurements should I use to create my own full-bleed pages? (I will be dropping these pages into Booksmart’s full-bleed layout, and I want to size them accurately, and NOT zoom within Booksmart to get a true full-bleed page.) As of today this info is listed on the Blurb FAQ webpage only for the small 8″x10″ landscape books, under the question “Can I import my own design into Booksmart?” (the anwer given is: “When importing high-resolution graphics or page designs, use the following measurements:
… For Landscape pages: 8.25 inches high by 9.62 inches wide.”) So — what are the corresponding measurements for the new 11″ x 13″ Landscape book??
Thanks mucho!
Katya
AWESOME!!!!! thank you!
..patiently waiting for WordPress slurping support…
Nice! I just wish the 13×11 landscape was available in portrait size.
Congratulations! Just one slight niggle; I’d have expected the new line-spacing options to be in fractions of a line (say 1, 1.25,1.5,1.75, 2 lines); for everything else, there’s the Return button. Perhaps someone was suffering a sugar rush from the chocolate testing, the day they programmed that feature. ;-)
…also patiently waiting for WordPress support… :
Katya – Check out our recently updated FAQ on “How can I import my own design into BookSmart? It’s got bleed information for all of our book sizes. Thanks!
I am writting a family history book with years worth of genealogical references and need either footnote or end note as format.
I need superscript fonts!
I couldn’t find any of these 3 ideas in any location on the help line or in the context of the software.
Am I missing something ? or just stating the obvious?
Hi Joyce – Sounds like you’re working on quite a project. I suggest you contact our customer support team through http://www.blurb.com/help/support. In the meantime, I’ll get your requests in our BookSmart team.
Thanks.