Eileen Gittins, its chief executive, is female, for a start and stylish.How to download apps for Mac. Its more robust and responsive, Y our typical Silicon Valley startup is run by a rarely washed teenager with borderline Asperger's Syndrome, who's never heard of profit but wants to sell for billions, right? That makes Blurb very atypical. Mosh is a replacement for interactive SSH terminals.Install BookSmart on a Mac. Double-click the BookSmart icon to launch BookSmart, and start creating your book. In the App Store, if an app has a Get button instead of a price, the app is free.Double-click the Install Blurb BookSmart icon to launch the installation wizard, and follow the directions. If you see the 'Open' button instead of a price or Get button, you already bought or downloaded that app. Click the price or Get button.What if you created a company that would handle the printing using a print-on-demand model? You'd generate the book on your computer with some software, upload a file with all the relevant data, and it would be passed to the printing company, which could do a run of one, or 10, or 10,000. The quotes for publishing it were horrendous not only that, but there was the huge delay in getting the printing scheduled. In 2003, she wanted to produce 40 copies as gifts. It's a publishing company with nobody from mainstream publishing: "We're from Kodak, Apple, Google, Yahoo," Gittins says.The idea for Blurb came in her time after Verb, when Gittins, a former Kodak executive, returned to her love of photography: she compiled a photographic essay about people in and around Silicon Valley. Gittins is evidence of the saying in American business: you don't get really smart until you've gone bust twice.With Blurb, she's doing something smart: disintermediating a section of publishing (specifically, though she doesn't use the phrase, "coffee-table" - high-quality photographic - books) and making a physical product on which the company is certain to make a profit. She was then was on the board of Verb, which did contextual search.
Blurb App Manual Labour InAll that was needed then was the software. "But if you could create a standard file each and every time, then you could automate the pre-press process."From that came a business model. "There's a lot of manual labour in traditional printing," she says. The third worried her: what if someone used a photo in a book that wasn't actually theirs to print? But lawyers assured her that as long as she followed "best practice" (such as having an ombudsman to rule in such cases, and witholding the file from further printing), the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) limited the damages to the "actual loss" (of reprint fees) to the copyright owner no punitive damages, which is what terrifies any startup.That done, she embarked on a tour of printing companies to find what file format they would need and how much they would charge for printing. "One, could we make money on the printing? Two, was it just a niche of one - myself - who wanted this? And three, would I go to jail over copyright?"The first two questions were easy. Validated, Gittins saw a potential business."I only had three questions about it," says Gittins.![]() Early expectations have been borne out: "about 30% to 35% of our users are on Apples," Gittins says.But it's not the software or the printing that makes Blurb different. So the software - which took a year to write, including its e-commerce engine - is in cross-platform Java. Blurb's customers, she saw, would be heavily on the Apple side, drawn from professional photographers or designers, who tend to use Macs. And authors can keep updating the book by updating the file: "We have a woman in the US, an environmental architect, and we asked her why she used us for her book, and she said that it's because it's environmentally aware - we only print when there's a buyer the turnaround time means she can update the book three or four times a month rather than having to wait 18 months for it to be printed and the creative control it gives her. With Blurb, books are only printed when someone clicks to buy them on the company's site: zero waste. The ones you see in shops are only the tip of the iceberg hundreds or thousands more are printed and then pulped. "The public has no idea how many books are printed," she says. So far this year Blurb has printed 140,000 different books, with people putting an average markup of $10 (£6.50) on them. And by setting the price right, any sale is a profit - and Blurb offers Facebook, Bebo and blog widgets to let people sell their books directly. If mainstream publishers adopted Blurb's file formats, they wouldn't have to worry about pulping unsold books. They're calling us." After all, a book need never go out of print with Blurb: it simply waits to be bought. "But they've had a front-row seat to what's happened in other industries like music and film. A photographer covering the FA Cup, say, could produce a book that would be ready not long after the final whistle fans filing out could pick up a ticket with a link to the book of the event, with the front cover showing the cup being hoisted.She expected mainstream publishers wouldn't be friendly. "The European side of the business has gone from 2.5% to 12.5%."On copyright Gittins becomes animated. We make money on the printing," she says.) The focus on repeatability and cost means that there's presently only one printing site in Europe, in the Netherlands, although Gittins is investigating one for Prague. ("Lulu makes money when you sell your book. Even so, she says that "we're being driven by customers who want to publish those sorts of books."But the clever thing is that it makes money every time someone clicks to buy a book. Gittins's connections meant that when Sequoia Capital gave its now-famous "RIP Good Times" presentation to its venture-funded companies (Blurb isn't among them), "I had 14 copies of the Powerpoint in my inbox the same day. "Yes, there will be more pressure to use copyright material because it's high quality," Gittins says.Meanwhile, she's watching the deflation of the web 2.0 bubble with detachment - because in the summer, despite "not really needing it" ("we aren't burning cash," she says) Blurb raised an extra $5m of venture capital, leaving it with more than $10m in the bank. (EBay already sees similar problems: see Digital thieves swipe your photos - and profit from them, June 19 2008). I think this will drive that."The only potential fly in the ointment as Blurb gets bigger and gets more users, is that some will be tempted to grab copyrighted material from the internet and try to profit from it. "If you're an author and you've done the work, you should get the reward and it's a win for the technology side because it's making us think about new rules for protecting usage rights. Peg dmgPerhaps one day the story of Blurb will be a coffee-table book, available on Blurb's site - where, of course, it'll never go out of print. "What this really means is a chance to put daylight between ourselves and the competition." It certainly looks like a success story so far. "If they're not performing, well, of course that's a different matter," she says, and her steel shines through briefly.
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