FOWA is all about webapps, so I was amazed to see a stand that had a cool piece of software running in Mac OS X. The company is Blurb, and their self publishing tool runs on both Windows and Mac. The choice for an offline editor for an online service is interesting but in the end actually quite understanding.

In a time of webapplications that make you order your businesscards using Flickr photos, and order your self published books via Lulu, it has become common practice to have an online editor for these physical products. Still, on the other hand there are tools like iPhoto and Picasa that make it more of a pleasure to use your photo library to make a physical product without doing the editing in a sometimes not perfect webapp. The BookSmart software of Blurb takes the middle road, allowing people to use online and offline libraries to publish via the webservice by Blurb.

The actual really thing that I noticed abotu Blurb was the fact that it is dirty cheap. Melinda and I have been looking at some other websites like QOOP to make a photobook or calendar for our parents for christmas, and the Blurb service is simply way cheaper. The quality is really good, as they had a wide range of their books lying around. They even did the “24 hours of Flickr” book, so the photo quality is guaranteed to be good.A simple softcover (18×18cm, 20-40 pages) photobook that you can style yourself will set you back €9.95, a large hardcover version (33×28cm, 20-40 pages) will cost you about €41,95. Compare this to QOOP this is at least €10 cheaper. More prices can be found here. Shipping is from Amsterdam, and if you use the promo code “FOWA” you will even get the shipping costs for free!

The only problem for now is that I can’t seem to get the BookSmart software to work with iPhoto ‘08, but I have reported the bug. I hope to show my first book someday soon.