Book Module with third party Printers?

[billb3690]

Lightroom Version Number

Latest 2023 subscription

Operating System

1. macOS 10.15 Catalina

Greetings. I am a long time photographer, but new to book printing. I spent some time learning the basics of the layout options, and they seem great. My problem is that this “module” seems to really only work well if you chose to print with a single printer (Blurb). I Have nothing against Blurb, but they are very expensive when compared to other printing companies, particularly for large quantities. I see where you have the option to download a .pdf version of your final layout, but that only seems to work if you are using one of the very limited size options that Blurb offers. Is Blurb owned by Adobe?

I am looking at putting together an order with Bookbaby, but open to other suggestions, as their prices for 100 books is a fraction of Blurb. However, they, and others large printing companies, have slightly different sizes and require the final .pdf’s be formatted with CMYK. while LR not export in CMYK, for a single image, it seems easy enough to make the change in Photoshop.

So am I missing something here, or is there a work around where I can create a layout for a common landscape letter sized (8.5 x 11) photo book in LR “book module”, and convert it in LR or PS to send to a major printing company?

Thanks in advance,

 

[Califdan]

Blurb is not owned by Adobe as far as I know. When Adobe first introduced the Book Module (2012 with LR/4) they made a business arrangement with Blurb to allow LR (as it was known at that time) to create books using a slimmed down version of Blurb's book making tools and be able to directly order book printing with Blurb from within LR. I don't know what financial arrangements there were between Blurb and Adobe but I presume that Blurb paid Adobe something to offset the cost of developing the Book Module, and I also assume that Adobe gets a cut of what you pay Blurb if you do it from LrC. I would not be surprised if those agreements included an exclusivity clause preventing Adobe from partnering with other book printing outfits for a number of years - and I'm not sure they would even want to at this point as the Book Module is not really a heavily used module and it is doubtful that Adobe gets many new customers due to it being there.

When it came out, I went through the process of creating a book through LR and having Blurb print it. Along the way I hit one thing after another where I could not create my book the way I wanted or in the size I wanted. What was especially frustrating was that the free book creation software directly from Blub was way more powerful and feature rich than the version in LR and in most cases provided the features I wanted. So, on my second book I just used LR to select the images I wanted for my book and put those images into a collection. Then, rather than using LR's Book module, I exported the images in the Collection to a folder on my hard drive and used Blurb's free tools to create the book and send it to them for printing and that worked much better. It was a bit cumbersome to add new images to the book and I didn't wind up using all the images I originally exported leaveing the collection in LR as an inaccurate representation of the images that actually wound up in the book but I later straightened that out manually.

I have since used the same approach but with other printing companies untill I stopped printing books and instead opted for a website that is more easily accessed.