Pixiq

Blurb, the creative publishing and marketing platform, launched Blurb Bookify, an online bookmaking tool designed to streamline the creation of beautiful, high-quality photo books.

Within Bookify, users will find a curated collection of the most popular layouts, fonts, and design elements for book creation. Additionally, users will be able to drag and drop images directly onto a page and the page will design itself. Bookify is the latest addition to Blurb's complete suite of bookmaking tools.

The market is preparing itself for the next wave of photobooks options, as the recent Photokina fair has shown, and with so many applications already offering the option to make books online, Blurb could not stay behind.

"If your goal is to make a knock-'em dead photo book, tonight, Bookify is for you," said Eileen Gittins, Blurb's founder and CEO. "We have streamlined the whole bookmaking experience by curating our most popular layouts, coupled with the convenience of using your photos stored on Flickr or on your computer. And the great news is that all books made with Bookify offer the same professional quality that Blurb is known for. So whether you are a creative professional or just want to look like one, prepare to amaze your friends with your Bookify Blurb book."

Bookify offers users a streamlined experience by presenting a selection of Blurb's most popular layouts, themes, and fonts in an online bookmaking tool that requires no download. The key features of Bookify include:

Online Ease and Portability
    * No need to download anything
    * Work on your book from more than one computer
    * Use images stored on Flickr or on your computer

A Range of the Most Popular Book Styles and Layouts
    * Pre-designed layouts to edit and personalize — or just drag and drop images onto    the page and it will design itself
    * Elegant, fun, or classic themes — you choose the look you like
    * Multiple background colors and borders
    * Make books up to 160 pages

Creative Options
    * More than 20 fonts to choose from
    * Autofit, zoom, crop, or rotate images; supports JPEG images up to 10MB
    * Full-bleed and multi-image layouts
    * Five trim sizes available

AutoCreate Your Book
    * By selecting the AutoCreate feature, your book will be created automatically from your selected set of images. You can then order as is, or add, move or delete images as you see fit.

Professional Quality
    * Superb image quality and highest quality printing
    * Three bindery types available: Softcover, Hardcover with dust jacket, or ImageWrap
    * Premium and Standard papers available

Blurb created Bookify to meet the needs of the rapidly expanding photo book market. With the launch of Bookify, Blurb now offers a complete suite of bookmaking tools that supports projects from simple to more involved. All Blurb books feature the same high-quality printing and binding.

BookSmart is Blurb's award-winning software that's perfect for richer projects. The free, downloadable bookmaking app delivers the ideal mix of pre-designed layouts and text support with the ability to fully customize your book.

Blurb's PDF to Book tool gives professional users full creative control over the bookmaking process by enabling them to use Adobe InDesign or their preferred design software. Blurb offers blank Adobe InDesign templates tailored for use with all of the company's book sizes, papers, and cover types.

All Blurb customers have access to Blurb's free suite of tools to share and sell their books, including Blurb BookShow, which enables bookmakers to let friends and fans flip through their book on their blog, website, or Facebook page.

Testing the software online shows that some of the problems already present with other offerings of the same genre exist: on a slow connection you can have some trouble if your files are too big, and the software at this phase is still prone to crashes (on a Firefox browser) that make you loose either your work or patience.

Although it can be easier to use for people that don’t want to download BookSmart, Bookify can get on your nerves because it does not work, yet, as one expects. There seems to be, still, some problems to sort out. But when they’re solved, in the near future, Blurb will have another good tool for us photographers.

To begin a Blurb Bookify project, visit http://www.blurb.com/bookify.