I've been looking into the practicality of making photo books. There's no single winner as far as I have been able to make out, and I have not yet actually tested any of them. But here's what I believe the practical options are:

Lulu is optimized for text: books with words and some pictures. You send them a PDF and they print you a book. But not any PDF will work: in particular Pages PDFs are shunned. There are ways around this restriction but they cost money and/or are fiddly. Lulu's prices are OK.

Blurb is optimized for photos: books with photos and some words. Their prices are very good, and the quality is good. You have to use their tool, BookSmart, to create the book and upload it. It's template-driven and drag and drop. However, it's written in Java, is incredibly slow, and has enough interface and font quirks to drive a person batty. The templates are large in number, but ultimately limiting because they are it. These are not starting-points. Either the photos go exactly there, or they don't go. The good news is that it can only get better, but to date progress has been slow.

Aperture's and iPhoto's books are expensive and the tools limited, so I didn't seriously consider them.

Everyone else's solution is either aimed at a specific market. MyPublisher is extremely dumbed down and doesn't match what I want to do. But they have a great native Mac application called BookMaker.

I'll probably go for Blurb if I do make a book, but it will be on my terms. I'll design my book using Pages or something and then only as a last step put it all into BookSmart. Another option is to upload full-resolution JPEGs of pages designed outside of the application, so I may use that technique sparingly.

But first I need content.

Tags: Photography, Books, Aperture