Blurb's Photography Book Now Contest Is Open

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Blurb’s 2010 Photography Book Now contest is open through July 15, 2010.
Now it’s in its third year, this international competition celebrates the most creative, most innovative, finest print on demand photography books – and the people behind them.
Showcase your work to a jury of internationally-renowned judges – editors, publishers, photographers, and gallery owners.
Enter your books in one or more of three categories – Fine Art, Editorial, and Portfolio.
The grand prize is $25,000.
Find out more here.
See the 2009 winners here.

How Long Will Blurb Books Last ?

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How long will your Blurb books last?
100 years in dark storage, 45 years in average display conditions, before visible fading occurs.
Blurb books are printed with HP Indigo presses. HP shares Henry Wilhelm’s permanence data. “The study gives pages printed with HP Indigo presses a Wilhelm Digital Imaging Research (WIR) Display Permanence Rating of approximately 45 years, which is longer than the best-rated silver-halide photo paper, Fuji Crystal Archive. The HP Indigo rating is also more than twice as long as the WIR Display Permanence Rating for prints on Kodak silver-halide photo paper. The study also shows that HP Indigo photo book prints received a WIR Album/Dark Storage Rating of greater than 100 years.”
Stay tuned for announcements on my upcoming New York and Toronto Blurb seminars.
Find my Blurb book Antarctica here.
Learn more in my Fine Art Digital Printing Workshops.

Made To Stick

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Chip and Dan Heath’s Made to Stick is must read material for any communicator – artist, businessperson, social advocate, politician, partner, parent … well, anyone really. Made To Stick will give you a proven formula for making any message more memorable and effective.
SUCCESs their simple formula.
Simple
Unexpected
Concrete
Credible
Emotional
Stories
That’s the key take-away from the book but it’s richly elaborated with hundreds of great stories about how SUCCESs is put into practice.
I give this book my highest recommendation.
Find the book here.
Find out more about the book and free online resources here.

Blurb Features John Paul Caponigro's Next Step Alumni


Blurb highlighted my alumni’s Blurb Group Book John Paul Caponigro’s Next Step Alumni Group on their blog today. Blurb’s Natalie Shahmiri asked me about the project and about my impressions of the state of books.
Here’s an excerpt.
“Books have been essential ways of sharing work for artists. Without them a majority of artists’ works would have remained invisible. Only a few people would have see them, not larger audiences. Even with the advent of the world wide web, books remain important communication and marketing tools. Printed matter offers focussed, localized, persistence while the web offers diffuse, transient, ubiquity. Books can also be the final product, special things in and of themselves.
While I will continue to work with major publishers, print on demand solutions are becoming essential tools for communicating and marketing my own work – specifically Blurb. Stay tuned to johnpaulcaponigro.com for many new Blurb books from me in the near future.”
Read the rest here.

Blurb Books From PDFs


Now you can use your own graphics layout software to design books and print them on Blurb. Or, you can have someone do this for you. The point is you don’t have to use Blurb’s BookSmart software to make Blurb books anymore. Of course, your designs need to fit standard Blurb book sizes. But after that … the sky is the limit.
Find out more here.