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Blurb.com

All trades have tricks that keep the novice in the dark, like an easy mark. Blurb is particularly deceptive because they dazzle you into selecting gorgeous 'Art Book, Large Landscape' formats from their sumptuous layouts, before you imagine that those formats can't be downloaded as an ebook. Blurb has gorgeous examples of exquisite portfolio books, in their store, so you want to jump it; it looks so safe: Until you are submerged in quick sand: not one of those books loads onto an ereader the way that it looked in the Blurbstore. I spent a year being Blurb's fool and never got a book out of it: They don't tell you that your book can not have 'stationary graphics,' they just keep telling you, "หœoh, it works best on Apple's iPad:' it works not at all. Not even one page looked close to the way I designed it. All ereaders throw your book against the wall; play '52 card pickup' with it; and then put it into a vague semblance of the layout that you crafted. Blurb says, 'well maybe you should hire a professional, from our list.' Maybe Blurb should tell people that 'what you see is nothing like what you get.' Their templates are quicksand. That is what the 'professionals' know. Then Blurb says, 'Oh, just scan it, it will be fine, it only costs 25 bucks;' in fact it costs $1,000 bucks, and it simply does not solve the problem: your book still appears like morphed wet clay and in no way resembles what you submitted for epub. Then Blurb says, 'Oh we never told you to spend any money, we are honest.' They are so honest that they have 645 of my buck, and I have a dead end that cost me a year of my life, and thirty thousand dollars, plus opportunity costs, for NO return. I am not laughing. I have no ebook to sell; The Jabberwocky looked so bad, as an iPad ebook, that I had to delete it, instantly, before any Blurb victims; stupidly shopping in their store, downloaded it: Plus pay another 215 bucks to put The Jabberwocky up again, in order to sell it as a hardbound book: a market that it is not designed for, in which it will not sell well. Unfortunately for Blurb, my magazine column has over one million readers, so there are, at least, one million potential Blurb customers who will not be doing business with Blurb. (Coffee Table Art Books my bee-hind, more like Portfolio Fiasco books.) Artists need not bother to use Blurb: because the book that Blurb blithely invites will look like a hodgepodge: once you pay for it!

โ€“Bag Lady

Blurb responds: Oh? Whatever do you mean! You must be ***, everything is just fine; got any more money that you want to

burn on us?

Monetary Loss: $215.

Location: Castaic, California

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This complaint is small compared to yours but I tried "blurp" for a few hours and everytime I went to save a project told me something to the effect that there was no need to save work as it's done automatically. Having past experience with autosave in video editing I know this could be a double edge sword.

Sure enough after two hours somehow I inadvertently reformatted a number of pages...of course my project was autosaved and now I was stuck with a worthless mess. Can't believe there is no "save as" function and their undo function is a joke as you find yourself trying frantically to beat the autosave monster.

A email contact to a blurb tech who responded within a few hours told me there was no override feature to this.

Absolutely stunning!

Hope you were able to publish your work on another platform. Best regards, Bob T.

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