Blurb, Inc.
| Company type | Private |
|---|---|
| Industry | Computer software |
| Founded | incorporated 2005 |
| Headquarters | San Francisco, CA, USA |
Key people | Eileen Gittins, CEO |
| Products | BookSmart |
Number of employees | unknown |
| Website | www.blurb.com |
Blurb
Blurb, Inc. is a populist publishing service headquartered in San Francisco, California. The company was founded by Eileen Gittins in 2004 and funded by Canaan Partners and Anthem Venture Partners, with a mission to bring book publishing to the masses. Blurb offers the general public the opportunity to create, publish, share and ultimately market professional quality books.
Background
Blurb is an outgrowth of the open-source movement and the related trend of "life caching," or using digital technology to capture passing ideas, events, and memories. These twin phenomena have yielded volumes of digital content, including 26 million blogs tracked by Technorati in 2005, and some 20 billion digital photos taken in 2005, according to the Photo Marketing Association. With technology platforms subject to change and content formats at risk of becoming obsolete, Blurb proposed a hybrid new-old media solution: a publishing service that allows users to permanently cache ideas, events, and memories in book form.
Blurb BookSmart(™)
The centerpiece of Blurb’s publishing service is its BookSmart software, which turns blogs, business plans, recipes, photos, email, wikis, or any other content into a professional quality book. This bookmaking application allows users to drag and drop pictures and text into professionally designed books with dust jackets, customizable backgrounds, page layouts, and color palettes. Unlike standard digital photo album applications, BookSmart provides text options, book sizes from 20 to 440 pages, custom covers, and an autoflow feature that automatically flows photos. Each book is then printed on demand, in any quantity, from one to several thousand. BookSmart runs on any PC running Windows 2000 or XP, and Apple running Mac OS X. Blurb’s beta version of BookSmart became available to the public in May 2006.
Reputation
BookSmart was released in a private beta test in 2005, and Blurb’s Beta version of BookSmart earned accolades at the 2006DEMO consumer technology conference, where the company premiered in February. Due to advance buzz for Blurb, nearly 10,000 individuals signed up to receive BookSmart while the software was still in its beta-testing phase. Blurb’s Blog Book Beta is currently in progress.
See also
Blurb BookSmart
External links
- Official website
- New York Times article
- BusinessWeek article
- FastCompany article
- Washington Post article
- Wired News article
- USA Today article
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