Gordon,
What is your experience of the print quality?
How are the colors?
Print resolution?
I´ve just had a quick look at their site and haven´t found any ICC profiles, maybe one gets access to them after registering/login in?
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Blurb has a business-to-business program in Beta testing called "B3" that both provides a color profile for soft-proofing but also allows you to specify that your books will be run with the same printers--Blurb either owns or has relationships with multiple printers that do the back end, the "B3 Custom Workflow" in theory gives you more consistent results. "For a few bucks more", of course.
If you peek through the preview of my book from this page: [a href=\"http://www.blurb.com/bookstore/detail/289652/]http://www.blurb.com/bookstore/detail/289652/[/url]
you'll see, I think, that I manged to put the printer through it's pacing, with high-key and low-key images and a lot of near-but-not-quite-neutrals. The hues were dead on, I was stunned. For my money, the profile was tweaked a little bit as if it expected a little less light on the book than the profiles I get from my Lightjet print vendor, but then the Blurb books don't have quite the contrast range of LJ prints, so a tweak or two wasn't a problem.
For the money, Blurb seems to be an exceptional value. I like the hardcover binding better than the softcover. Customer service was excellent. Blurb has my recommendation.
I need to say a few words about MyPublisher
A couple years back I ran some test books through a few vendors (Ofoto and MyPublisher come to mind), I had world-class bad experiences with MyPublisher. The books showed a lot of problems, but worse, the delivery date for the big order of books I did through them ended up getting delayed and delayed, each time with the assurance that it would make the date of the book signing associated with the opening of my 2004 photographic show "Signatures of the Sun."
After much screaming, and chasing down an actual human at MyPublisher (I ended up spending a lot of time playing with their voice mail system after hours to find a human) Eventually, too late for the marketed book signing I ended up with ten copies of the "Harris Family Album, volume 4, 1964-1973." I ended up calling the Harris family, they had my books, we just Fedex'd the right books to each other and called it a day, both at that point so frustrated with the bullshit we'd endured to actually communicate with MyPublisher again.
There is nothing, nothing that would make me ever darken their digital doorstep again.
Ofoto's books were okay, but I like the results at Blurb better.
There are higher-end services for wedding pros and such that have a really good reputation (e.g., AuskaBook), but the cost per book makes them prohibitive for a lot of resale uses.
--Joe