blurb

Quite a kerfuffle has erupted over news in the last couple of days that Amazon is going to make print-on-demand (POD) publishers use Amazon's own internal printing service if they want to sell their books on the site.

Printing-on-demand has become a popular method for authors to bypass the large publishing houses with more niche or personal titles. And apparently the university presses have embraced it as well. So Amazon's announcement has some fairly wide-reaching effects.

Cries of "monopoly" are ringing out, with Amazon getting compared to Microsoft and the tactic being called a "landgrab".… Read more

On Monday, it becomes official. Blurb.com, which offers do-it-yourself bookmaking, and photo-sharing site Flickr are teaming up to help consumers jazz up their self-publishing efforts.

"Flickr got feedback from their members that they wanted to make books...We have already got a lot of feedback from Flickr's end users," said Eileen Gittins founder and CEO of Blurb.

Flickr community members have used the Blurb service for a couple of months now, and Flickr printed the community-contributed compilation "24 hours of Flickr" through San Francisco-based Blurb.

But starting Monday, a link to Blurb will appear … Read more

San Francisco-based Blurb, a site that enables users to print as few as one copy of a book on demand, on Wednesday announced plans to expand its business to Europe.

The company plans to begin printing books in the Netherlands in three weeks. Europeans can now order books with a shipping time of 5 to 7 days (instead of 7 to 10 days) at a lower shipping rate.

Prints in Europe are set to maintain U.S. size standards: 7x7 inches, 8x10 inches and 13x11 inches. "We're going live with American sizes and see what the market prefers,&… Read more