A friend asked my advice for a firm to do a run of about 10 photo books. Any advice positive or negative? Thanks.
I've used Blurb several times, mostly because I can create a book entirely within the Lightroom book module. You have a decent selection of formats and paper stocks. The composition tools are flexible and straightforward. All the type fonts available on the host computer are available (at least, on the Apple Mac I use) for captions or other text. The draft book is uploaded to Blurb directly from Lightroom.
As I understand it, Blurb jobs out the orders to various printing partners. I believe they all use HP Indigo presses. If you have pre-sales questions, Blurb's customer service is quite responsive and I've been favorably impressed with the competence of their reps; I haven't needed to contact them regarding post-production issues, so I can't comment from personal experience about how well the company deals with printing problems.
One of my main complaints is that the Lightroom book module is painfully slow to respond to composition changes. I haven't tried to instrument it to determine whether that is because it is inherently inefficient or because it is constantly communicating with Blurb, but it's not because of insufficient hardware resources because I'm on a high-end Mac Studio. More serious from an image-quality perspective is that Blurb offers no color management—not only for those users, like me, who do everything within Lightroom, but also for those who use Blurb's standalone composition software, which I haven't tried.
For a low-volume vanity project, I think the Adobe-Blurb collaboration is a decent compromise.
