Blurb eBooks for iPad
I guess to some people that title will mean absolutely nothing. So for them here’s an explanation of each term.
Blurb
Blurb is a company that allows you to publish and print books. We’ve been using it for a while now to print our weblog (the one that you are currently reading) and the results are amazing. It’s a lot of work converting the weblog into a printed version, and when I say a lot of work I mean a lot of work. Each book takes literally hundreds of hours of work to reformat from the online weblog to a printed book, but it is worth it. The printed versions are gorgeous and are a lovely keepsake for us. Everyone who has seen them has loved them too. You can see our ‘bookstore‘ here.
eBooks
An eBook is an ‘electronic book’. Basically it is a book-length publication in digital form. It is published through, and readable on computers or other electronic devices. In this case it is an exact replica of the printed books we’ve been creating but in a version that can be read on a computer or iPad.
iPad
Well, I’m sure you all know what an iPad is.. It’s a ‘Magical’ tablet device from Apple.
So, the news is that Blurb now offer the ability to create eBooks from any book made with Blurb BookSmart® or Blurb Bookifyâ„¢ This means you can get full resolution, beautiful versions of your books on Apple’s iOS® devices for a fraction of the cost of the printed book.
Clearly as someone who has published books via Blurb and who owns an iPad I had to give it go, so I tried to convert our 2009 edition of our weblog. The process was fairly straight forward – I simply had to select the ‘iPad/iPhone’ version from within the Blurb bookstore, pay £1.49 for the conversion and then wait for the process to complete. Once done I was able to send a link to myself in an email. I then opened that link in a web browser on my iPad and the eBook was downloaded and automatically added to iBooks on my iPad. I could then adjust some settings so that I could sell the eBook version via Blurb for £3.49 (a bargain for anyone!)
Incorrect PNG Rendering
Trouble is, when I went to view it all the pages appeared to be rendered as negatives… Hmm, not quite what I was expecting. I contacted Blurb Customer Support and got the following reply:
“Unfortunately, this is caused by the conversion process not rendering PNG image files correctly. We are working towards resolving this issue as soon as possible.”
So, it looks like a great idea and I’m looking forward to getting eBook version of all of our books, but not until they have resolved the issues with the rendering of PNG images.
