Anyone who pays "as little as $29.95 for a single copy of a 40-page hardcover book, custom jacket included" is not very smart. Unless that's all they want, and they want it to be mindlessly easy to create. That's what it costs, as a minimum, to publish one copy of a book using BookSmart software from Blurb.com.
Now, Blurb.com does offer some great BookSmart software to make a book out of a blog, website, or user-generated content website (such as MySpace or Flickr). But their cost to print that book afterwords is high. The balance you have to seek as a BookSmart author is how much time the software saves you in laying out a book (if it actually does save you time) versus the cost to print that book in comparison to Lulu.com, AuthorHouse.com, InfinityPublishing.com, etc.
Blurb.com, itself, is brilliant. Incredible. They just received another $12 million in additional venture capital to build their business. Wow. No venture capital firm is making that kind of commitment to a real book publisher. Too bad.
Canaan Partners and Anthem Venture Partners led this round of additional investors.
Eileen Gittins is founder and CEO of Blurb. John Balen is general partner of Canaan Partners, the lead investor.
