Make Your Own Coffee Table Book

[Suhit Gupta]

<div class='os_post_top_link'><a href='http://www.tomsguide.com/us/digital-photo-books,review-1102-9.html' target='_blank'>http://www.tomsguide.com/us/digital...iew-1102-9.html</a><br /><br /></div><p><em>"Vacations, graduations and weddings are just a few examples of summer events that yield goldmines of valuable memories in the form of digital photos. It&rsquo;s easy to print these pictures, just like we did with regular film, and then take the pictures and put them in albums. But this &ldquo;old-school&rdquo; approach to photo sharing offers little of the flexibility inherent to digital media: mixing, editing, cropping, enhancing. You can do more with digital pics, such as printing your own photo books. It&rsquo;s not hard, and it isn&rsquo;t terribly expensive. And nothing beats the control and fine-tuning available to you when you&rsquo;re a self-publisher. There are many different services currently available, which provide varying degrees of photo book flexibility. Some of these services are online-only, where the user never needs to install anything. Other applications require a client download of some sort that needs to be installed and run on your local computer."</em></p><p><img src="http://images.thoughtsmedia.com/resizer/thumbs/size/600/dht/auto/1215430769.usr14.jpg" border="1" alt="" /></p><p>To be honest, I have never made a coffee table book, although I have friends that certainly have them and take great pride in showing them off. I like this article because it is quite thorough with analyzing the various players in the mrket. Based on the article alone, I would like to give Snapfish a try because it looks pretty easy to use. Have any of you create coffee table books?</p>

[Jason Dunn]

I've used Blurb to create a small 7" x 7" coffee table book and was quite fairly impressed with it - the paper quality wasn't quite as high as I was hoping for, but it wasn't very expensive and everyone who has picked it up was wowed by it. There's something really wonderful about having your photos in tangible book form.

[Jason Dunn]

I've now read the article, and I think the author focused a bit too much on the time taken for the book to print and ship rather than the options available for quality. He selected all soft-cover books, most with the "picture window" cover...this are a bit cheesy in my opinion. One of the reasons I got my last book printed at Blurb was that they had a hard-cover option where you could get the dust cover custom-printed. That makes the book looks really professional.

[Bob Christensen]

Because of a coupon I received, I did an 8"x8" photo book at Shutterfly.com and I liked it very much. In fact, I've done a second one for my mother and I am planning a third. The paper is heavy, good quality, and you can get a hard cover or soft padded cover on most photo book options.