Blurb.com

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Blurb Inc.

Type	Private
Founded	Incorporated 2005
Headquarters	San Francisco, CA, USA
Key people	Eileen Gittins, CEO
Industry	Computer software
Products	BookSmart
Employees	unknown
Website	www.blurb.com

1 Blurb, Inc.
2 See also
3 External links

[edit] Blurb, Inc.

Blurb, Inc. is a creative 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.

[edit] 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.

[edit] Blurb BookSmart

The centerpiece of Blurb’s publishing service is its BookSmart bookmaking software, which turns blogs, business plans, recipes, photos, email, wikis, or any other content into a bookstore-quality book. This bookmaking application allows users to drag and drop pictures and text into professionally designed book templates, 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.

[edit] Reputation

BookSmart was released in a private beta test in 2005, and Blurb’s Beta version of BookSmart earned accolades at the 2006 DEMO 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. Time Magazine named Blurb one of 2006’s “50 Coolest Web Sites,” and the service has been featured in the New York Times, Wired News, and elsewhere. Blurb’s Blog Book Beta is currently in progress.