BLURB
BookSmart
Watch Out
This is a cautionary note regarding use of BookSmart software
offered by Blurb.
Blurb offers an excellent service of producing one or a small
quantity of color books at reasonable cost using digital production.
This is a practical way to envision your book in finished form and
to give you an opportunity to refine it before actual production.
It's also a great way to get one copy in your hands so you can
pre-sell it before making a significant investment in production.
There are two ways to do this. Unfortunately one of these
ways can really hurt you.
If you lay out your book using layout software that will let you
export a PDF file (such as InDesign), you can use that PDF to order
a book from Blurb. And you can subsequently use the PDF for
production of a quantity of books at a printer (real printing).
However if you use Blurb's BookSmart software, you are TRAPPED
and can not export or obtain a clean PDF file to use for subsequent
real production. The PDF output from Blurb has a watermark to
prevent you from using it for printing. This is obviously a way to
keep you on the ranch. Blurb's advice is to recreate your book in
another layout program. Here's the wording from Blurb customer
support:
Question: Is it possible to export
a PDF file from BookSmart?
Answer from Blurb:
Unfortunately, there's no way to print a PDF from BookSmart
without the watermark. I apologize for the
inconvenience
Question: Is it possible to
purchase a PDF from Blurb for a book that's set up in BookSmart?
Answer from Blurb: I'm sorry
to say that we unfortuntately don't offer an option like
that. You'd have to recreate the book in InDesign or another
layout program to be able to have PDF of your book.
So if you think it's possible that you'll want to print production
quantities of your book, my advice is avoid BookSmart and do your
layout in InDesign or other layout program, or have someone do that
layout for you.
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