I do. It was heartbreaking.
After lots of research on the internet, I gave up. There were a few options out there, but they were either way more expensive than Blurb or didn't have great reviews or were very limited in what I could do with them as far as customizing my book. I then decided to try to manually put my blog into Blurb to make a book. No dice. Uploading the text was a nightmare, and I would have had to upload all the pictures individually. (Like, looking on my blog, seeing what pictures were associated with which post, then finding those pictures on my server, and then uploading them.)
Ain't nobody got time for that.
And then a few weeks ago I decided to do a Google search for blog-to-book again. That's when I discovered Into Real Pages. They were relatively new, but had good reviews and fairly reasonable prices. For some reason I just had a good feeling about them, so I decided to give them a try.
My book arrived yesterday:
My basement is currently brimming with boys, ages 7-12, so I don't have much time. Or much hearing left. (More on all of that later...) So here's a quick pros and cons list for Into Real Pages.
Pros:
- Great physical quality - the binding is good, the paper is heavy, and the printing looks great.
- Super easy to upload my blog - far easier than Blurb, in fact. You can give it a specific time frame for which posts you want to upload. (Something Blurb desperately lacked and drove me crazy!)
- It takes a while for the book to render, but you can click an option to have the site email you once it's done. Awesome.
- Easy-to-use interface. If you want to go in and change post content or add/remove pictures to a post, you can do that on their site after you've already uploaded your posts. (For example, I had a missing image on a post. I went to the already uploaded post, removed the broken image, done.)
- You can create a book in an hour or two. With Blurb it would take me more than a week because I would customize everything and the software was always crashing. Drove me nuts.
- Great looking templates - they're simple and modern looking, and seem to use space well. I love the little page accents, such as the page numbers.
- Pricing was decent - they offer some great coupons. I spent $108 total for a portrait-sized hardbound book, which was pretty much the same as my Blurb books.
- It only took 11 days to receive my book. Since this company is based in the Netherlands, I'm assuming the book was printed and shipped from there. Less than 2 weeks isn't bad!
Cons:
- You can't customize your book. You can make your own cover (which I was too lazy to do!), but you have no control over page layout. As I mentioned above, this makes things WAY faster. On the other hand, I really wish I could have a bit of control on some of the picture sizes and text layout. Sometimes I love to have a full page bleed for some of my favotire photos from the year. (I'm looking at the website right now and it says there's customization; perhaps they've updated things, perhaps what they consider customization is different from what I consider customization! I'll be doing another book soon, so I'll look into this.)
- Because of the lack of customization I could only do 6 months of blog posts instead of a full year. This will obviously cost me more in the long run. (Although with my lack of blogging lately it could end up being the same since I'll need fewer pages in each book!)
- The picture quality is just not a good/crisp as Blurb's was. (Although I just looked at some of my old Blurb books, and the difference is minimal.) I suspect this is the same no matter what service you use, though, since they're pulling the pictures from your blog.
- The options for book size aren't the same as Blurb, so now my books are different sizes. Not really their fault, but kind of annoying. (I think this is because the website is based in the Netherlands, and European standard book sizes vary a bit from ours.)
Overall:
I am really quite pleased with this book! It looks great and is really high quality. I will definitely be using Into Real Pages again.
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