1/5

posted Apr-12-2013

"I have bought books of my photos from Blurb on several occasions. I've always been very happy with them until my last order. The day I received the last order of 5 books I contacted them to say I was unhappy with the quality of the images on the pages. The covers are great! The pictures on the pages look grainy and splotchy. Samie A. wrote back to me almost immediately and apologized for the problem. Samie and I wrote back and forth for a couple of days and I sent the original image, snapshot of the page and snapshot of the same image I'd had printed elsewhere. They said they'd check with some of their people to see if they could come up with anything about my problem. Well, that was four days ago. I've written them since then a couple of times, contacted their rep through Facebook and I'm getting very frustrated. I've got clients waiting on their books but I hate to give them if they aren't good enough quality. I'm feeling like I'm out of options. I will most definitely start looking for somewhere else to print my books!"

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1/5

posted Apr-04-2013

"I will upgrade this review once I hear back from Blurb. I ordered a few copies of a book I made -- $180 worth of purchases -- then needed to edit the book. I realized this within hours of ordering the copies, and uploaded the new version, but haven't yet had my "request" assigned to a customer service representative. I think it is ridiculous that they don't have a phone number, because this could be taken care of instantaneously if they did. "

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1/5

posted Feb-13-2013

"First let me say that my experience with hard bound editions (10) has been excellent, going back 5 years with nary a complaint. However trying to employ their new e-book conversion service was in a word "trying". Actually as a long-time computer user living in the Bay Area I am aware of "vaporware" and unready software being rushed to market, however (and here is my gripe) when I tried to rectify a design error in the conversion my support dialog suddenly stopped.

The problem I pointed out was that only half of a double-page spread appeared in the e-book and that was decidedly out of focus. This occurred with every double-page spread. When the fix of decoupling the spread was implemented, the two pages did appear but still out of focus. This is the point where the Blurb "stonewall" appeared--probably because they have no fix available.

Now that happens, and I will just not use their e-book product until they fix it--they did fully refund the e-book charge. But I can not except their rudeness in not acknowledging their error and lack of any indication as to a fix.

In short Blurb is demonstrating a failure to respond to the customer, which in my experience can be a harbinger of corporate decline, which in turn usually results in a decline in its product.

So concerned am I by this that I will put on hold all future orders and seek other avenues for "self publishing". "

This review was modified by TaleTwist on February 13 2013 11:27:08 AM

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5/5

posted Feb-10-2013

"I just received a large landscape book from Blurb in the mail yesterday, and I am thrilled with the result. It is a present for my mom for her birthday that is a compilation of her four children from the past ten years of our lives together. Mostly non professional pics, but also had some professionally taken and edited in there as well. All were printed as I expected with the colors exactly as I wanted. Even the few pictures that I scanned in on a not so great scanner turned out well.
I paid the extra $12 for the upgraded paper and am very happy with paper quality. I was also impressed with the embedded photos on the hardback cover. I did not use any Blurb layouts and made them all myself and everything was spaced and printed exactly as I wanted it. I had no problems with the software.
I have tried and been disappointed with the quality of both Mixbook (printing quality was awful and pages were falling out) and iphoto. I will recommend Blurb to any friends and will definitely use them again. "

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1/5

posted Feb-06-2013

"I have been receiving emails from Blurb for a long time now and finally got my act together to create a book. Well, I started the project two hours ago and had a lot of trouble uploading. Their website has been down the entire time! Next, I find this review site and all of them from 2013 are pretty bad. My worst fear, actually. Also, no customer support phone number? Are you kidding me? I'm really annoyed, and I haven't even BEEN ABLE to order yet! Guess I'll be taking my money elsewhere, but I wish I could get my TWO HOURS back! For those of you who have had especially terrible experiences, I'm sorry, but thanks for giving the heads up. Have you contacted the Better Business Bureau? Maybe that will help improve their business."

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5/5

posted Feb-04-2013

"I originally bought a landscape 10x8 hardcover book from Blurb about a month ago. Unfortunately, when I received it in the mail the title on the book was too far to the right (which did not appear on the online preview) and most of the images printed too dark.

I was pleasantly surprised after complaining about these issues that I was offered a complete re-print of the book, free of charge! Christopher (from Blurb Support) walked me through the reasons why the title was off and why the images might have printed too dark.

I am very satisfied with the customer service and quality of the book in the end.

Will definitely buy from Blurb again :)"

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1/5

posted Jan-14-2013

"Awful. Such a disappointing experience. I recently placed an order for an instagram book and the book I received was not the book I ordered. It was one of the original drafts of the book - the book they sent me was missing pictures, words, and included pictures that I had deleted weeks before. After contacting the company, I was told to send pictures of the book so they could try to figure out what happened. Then days went by and nothing. So I contacted them again and was told the girl repsonsible for my case would be e-mailing me ASAP. I'm still waiting for that e-mail. I spend $50 on this book - a gift that I was supposed to have given a week ago - and am just so incredibly disappointed by the whole thing. I will not order from them again."

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1/5

posted Jan-02-2013

"I am very disappointed with the final Product and the response BLURB gives onto complains (if they give one at all).
I did order 3 BOOKS - all together:
2 Large Landscape Hardcovers, Pro Line Pearl Photo PaperPaper
1 Standard Landscape Hardcover, Lustre Finish Paper.
There was no difference in weight or finish of the Paper in the Books, even though i paid $40 more for the "Pro Line" paper.
I retouched all images and color corrected them over the period of 4 days before i submitted the images.
The print Quality is extremely disappointing, the images look flat, faded, muddy and with a strong yellow and red color touch. Some are not even sharp.
Some pages were poorly cut and have a white cutting edge.
I paid $20 more to receive a delivery before Christmas and did receive the Order 3 days later.
I send a complain to Blurb and received an answer with request to submit photographs of the images/pages the complains were about.
I did so in regards to the badly cut pages , but how can this be done regarding the Paper Quality/weight and the discoloration of the images.
Since i have submitted the evidence and a detailed list of my complains, i have not heard back from Blurb !!!!!
I am a photographer and deal with color and paper quality on daily bases.
These Books are just poorly done and look like a rush job with no interest of the satisfaction of the customer.
I spend 4 days in putting 180 pages together, paid more than $500 for the order, spend more money to receive the Order in time as a Christmas gift for my wife,...... - this all for nothing.
And thanks BLURB for not getting back on my complains.
"

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1/5

posted Dec-18-2012

"I am having a terrible experience with blurb! I will never use them again!!! Don't try them if you haven't! Walmart will do a better job than they do! I ordered two wedding albums from them just in time for Christmas and they both arrived with horrible printing quality! What a disappointment! I sent in an inquiry as soon as I recieved them to see if they can reconcile the situation and their customer service is extremely slow and non responsive! There is not a phone number to call and no one to escalate issues to. If you have a problem there is zero support! I am extremely dissappointed with this experience. They won't give you a return address to get your money back even though it's their printers that have the problem. I am still fighting. Don't use them!!! Stay away!!!"

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5/5

posted Dec-14-2012

"I would like to say THANK YOU, THANK YOU, THANK YOU to Zo from Blurb's customer support desk.

I had received an order of 4 books that were to be Christmas gifts for a family, and some of the images in these books were not clear and were full of moire, unlike the JPEGs I had uploaded for my book. I was very disappointed and concerned, and I submitted a trouble ticket to the support desk.

Zo helped me through the process of troubleshooting to find out why my images didn't convert proplerly. The root cause was difficult to find, but the problem was that I had exported my images from LR4 to another plugin for sharpening, and once the images came back to LR4, I appied sharpening again on them. This caused the images to look like sparks with lots of moire when printed in the book.

But no worries, Zo made sure my books were reprinted and were shipped in time for Christmas. The PDF feature of Blurb is a great new feature, as it gave me the piece of mind that my book will look fantastic when it arrives.

Thank you Zo, and thank you Blurb Customer Support... You guys ROCK! Seriously! "

This review was modified by GUSTINPHOTO on December 18 2012 04:10:47 PM

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1/5

posted Dec-07-2012

"I ordered an Instagram photo book from Blurb on 11/26 because I was under the assumption they were the only company that does the square books that are meant specifically for Instagram photos. My book was ready for shipping fairly quickly on 11/29 and only 2 days later on 11/30 I already received the book in the mail.

This was great because the book was a secret Christmas gift for a friend that lives out of state from me. I compiled all the instagram photos of her newborn baby that she had posted online the past year.

Unfortunately, when I received the book, the very first thing I noticed was the artwork on the cover was printed off-center and the photos were literally 3mm from the right edge of the book with a 2.2 cm edge of white space on the left side of the book.

I have ordered several times from other photo book companies with no problem getting print defects corrected and reprinted, so I immediately contacted Blurb customer service to ask for a fix and reprint as it was clearly a print defect. I included a picture of the product as well. Their response was that it was not a print defect and it was my fault for going out of the "trim guidelines." This was a photo book made using all of Blurb's pre-made layouts. I did not touch anything with the layouts and simply selected the Instagram photos to be inserted in the book. How could that possibly be my fault?

I was insulted that they would try to blame this on the customer and not only that, I was surprised they were okay with printing a book of this quality that would be displayed and "advertised" on a coffee table for a lot of people to see. I replied back to their email questioning how it was the customer's fault and did not receive any resolve on the issue.

I found another brand new online business that prints the Instagram books and although the printing takes longer, it seems worth it to get the product done right! Although I tried planning this gift early by originally ordering from Blurb in November, my friend will no longer get her gift in time since I had to wait on Blurb's customer service only to be told there was nothing they could do and then have to reorder from another company that actually cares about their product quality.

Do not buy from Blurb. Read the CUSTOMER reviews first and do not believe the "sponsored" reviews you see online. They make sure to send a perfect product when they know their product is going to be reviewed on a big website, but they don't care about Joe-Schmoe who is ordering a true sentimental gift for someone.
"

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1/5

posted Dec-06-2012

"I was very disappointed after spending hours & hours creating a photo book for my wife for Christmas, archiving pictures of our 10 year anniversary trip to Ireland.

I just received it today and could not wait to take a peak and I wish I hadn't. The ability to build the book was bundled with my recently purchased copy of Adobe Lightrooom so I thought because of the affiliation with such a fine product that it would carry forward to the Blurb product, I was wrong.

The book has the look and feel of a children's book purchased at a toy store, paper very thin pages and Cover extremely cheap and cheesy. I wish I would have sought out a higher quality product, I was willing to shell out a few hundred if necessary, I paid $50 ish and got what I paid for. What a waste of my precious time!"

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2/5

posted Nov-27-2012

"Other than black and white photography, my Blurb produced books (eight of them) have been printed beautifully. My book of photography, half with black and white photos and half with color, is a major disappointment. The B&Ws are dull, warm gray tones even though I purposely add a cyan tint to my black and whites to make them cool grays. I was about to upload two more books to Blurb when I encountered a problem (seven crashes with full loss of data in a two hour period). I contacted Blurb customer support and haven't heard back a thing. As they no longer seemed to have a customer focus, I've decided to look elsewhere for my printing needs.

In addition, Blurb's newest products, brochures and magazines, are only available to designers using Adobe's InDesign program. They expect you to shell out $700 for software to produce a $12 magazine. Doesn't seem customer friendly to me."

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1/5

posted Nov-19-2012

"I made a photocopy of a type of "Yearbook" of a World War II Navy Escort for an elderly widow-friend of mine. I scanned each page at the highest quality, saved them as .tiff files, and then converted them to highest quality .jpg files. I printed them on my photo printer, and they looked great. I uploaded them to Blurb, and had a book made. All of the photos from Blurb look awful! All the photos have "cross-hatch" marks going through them so the pictures are hard to even see! Something happened in Blurb's process of converting these .jpg files to the .pdf files that they use. I contacted customer support, sent them a copy of the pages to illustrate the problem, and all they did was send me another copy of the same book with the same problem. I could tell my elderly friend was disappointed! I made a copy of another yearbook with a different company, and it looked great."

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1/5

posted Oct-20-2012

"The Blurb software won't open. Twice this has happened. The support suggested I uninstall and reinstall, I did, it worked until I closed the software and what do you know...it won't open again. Really poor software. I am willing to give it one more try if they can offer a solution as I'm in the middle of creating my book. Very frustrating."

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