Comparison of POD printers: Lulu vs Blurb vs MyPublisher


By C B Newham

December 2007


Introduction

I am interested in publishing coffee-table style books with lots of colour pictures, black & white pictures, and associated text. In my quest to find the best printer for these types of books I tried three Print-on-Demand (POD) services: Lulu, Blurb, and MyPublisher. I have used Lulu several times in the past and already have several publications available through them. As I am new to Blurb and MyPublisher, my only books made by them have been private test books (two with Blurb and one with MyPublisher).

The main aim of this web page is to compare the quality of the printed results. However, I will make some general comments about each of the services before I move on to the main feature.

Lulu

Lulu seems to be targeted at all market segments; from paperback writers to coffee-table book photographers. They also publish CD's, DVD's, calendars, and brochures. Lulu currently have printers in America, Spain, and the UK which means that the shipping times are fairly low for most people in the world.

As mentioned previously, I've used Lulu several times. Generally the service is ok. Looking through the Lulu forums one gets a feel for the level of service and how pleased/unhappy users are. On the whole I have found them to be satisfactory except in one case with a very large order where things did not go well. I would say they are no better and no worse than any other of the larger POD companies.

Books can be made in a variety of sizes, but if you want large format landscape then you are out of luck. This limits the usefulness of Lulu for my uses somewhat.

Lulu does not require their logo on the books. There are no extra or hidden charges. That's really nice to see. They also allow full wrap-around covers with complete control available to the creator.

You can use whatever tools you like to design your book and cover. All that is required at the end is a PDF file to upload to Lulu's site. That is also extremely good for anybody using a professional layout application like InDesign and/or Photoshop.

Blurb

Unlike Lulu, Blurb does not have such a scatter-shot approach. They seem to want to target people producing photographic books, both the holiday snaps type and the coffee-table type. Blurb is unique in that they provide a very large format landscape (13x11 inches) at a very reasonable price. Other formats for books are rather limited - it really does seem to be photographer orientated. I don't think you'd really want to use Blurb for paperbacks, for instance. Blurb has printers in America and also in Europe so shipping time is reasonably swift to most places in the world.

I have had only limited experience with the Blurb customer service. From the forums on their site it would seem that the experiences are mixed but mostly positive as at Lulu, although it's hard to say. They appear to be involved with their forums a lot more than the Lulu staff do, although that's my subjective view.

Blurb does require their logo on the books - on the back page - unless you pay extra for each copy of the book. That isn't very good. You'll find there are quite a few people who have raised objections to this in the Blurb forums. I'm hopeful they might one day quietly drop the logo requirement.

Blurb unfortunately forces you to use their "BookSmart" software for creating a book. For people who have not done any layouts before this is an excellent application. For the rest of us it is a right pain. Not only is BookSmart a reinvention of the wheel, it forces unacceptable constraints on the creator. Images in the resulting PDF that BookSmart uploads are saved at quality level 9 (apparently), so expect to see JPEG artifacts. If you want to use InDesign you have to do a convoluted conversion from InDesign PDF to individual JPEGS and then import them into BookSmart in order for BookSmart to generate and upload a PDF. As Blurb seemingly wants to target the photo book market I think this is less than optimal.

Currently Blurb has minimal support for covers; you can't do proper wrap-around covers with your own spine design and text.

MyPublisher

This POD company I have used the least. Indeed, I've done only the one test book. I would have liked to have tried them a bit more, but as their printer is in America it took a long time to ship the book. Indeed, I had a calendar printed by Lulu (that uses their US printer) ordered after the MyPublisher order and it turned up well before the MyPublisher book. Obviously MyPublisher  must be using an extra-slow postal service. If you live in Europe as I do then you will be waiting a very long time for each book.

Generally I have heard good things about MyPublisher. A quick review of their forums turns up the same level of complaints and praise as the other two, so I guess it's pretty much the same.

MyPublisher requires their logo only on the smaller format books. Large format books are sans logo - very good.

As with Blurb, MyPublisher decided to reinvent the wheel and force everyone to use their new invention. This time the application is called MyPublisher BookMaker. The same comments that I made about Blurb's BookSmart also apply to this. Please give users the ability to upload a PDF!

Book Comparison

I selected a set of pictures and created some test images too. I then created books for each POD printer. In all cases I used InDesign and Photoshop. In the case of Lulu I created the PDFs, uploaded them and had Lulu generate the book. In the case of Blurb and MyPublisher I created the PDFs, ran them through Photoshop to generate a set of JPEGs, and then loaded them into the proprietry applications to generate and upload the books. In all cases the images were created at the highest quality. One important point to note: text is part of the image in both the Blurb and MyPublisher cases. I did not use their applications to generate any text. In theory this should make no difference as the text is being generated at 300DPI. However, as both BookSmart and  BookMaker probably save JPEGs in their own uploaded PDFs at some low-quality setting, it is possible for text to have JPEG artifacts. This might explain some (but certainly not all) of the results below.

The books created were:

Lulu: 7.5 x 7.5 inches saddle-stitch softcover. Printed by a Xerox IGen 3 printer.
Blurb: 7 x 7 inches hardcover. Printed by a Xerox IGen 3 printer.
MyPublisher: 8 x 6 inches perfect-bound softcover. Printed by an HP Indigo printer.

I also had another book printed by Blurb in a different format in order to see the results from the HP Indigo printer (only Blurb 7x7's are being printed on an IGen 3 at the current time). It's a very different book with some of the same test subjects in it (not shown in the photo below, but samples are shown in the examples).

The three companies use two printers, the Xerox IGen3 and the HP Indigo 5000. Both use toners to create the image on the paper, however the IGen 3 is a so-called dry-powder toner printer, while the Indigo uses a toner suspended in solution.

The Blurb book is excellently made. It came out exactly as I'd designed it in InDesign. My only complaint, and a minor one, is that the dust jacket has curled at the edges and has a distinct lip - large enough to get caught and rip the cover.

The MyPublisher book also turned out well. Although Perfect bound with only a few pages, nothing fell out when I opened it - it even survived the flatbed scanning for this article without a problem.

The Lulu book was sub-par. I've had softcover books made before by Lulu and this is by far the worst example I've seen. The image I had for the cover wasn't quite large enough (I wanted it printed at the same scale on each book) and so I put some purple borders on to fill up the space. As you can see, the cover was not cut square. The saddle-stitched book doesn't lie flat (see the picture on the right). Interestingly, this one was printed in the UK, but a larger format saddle-stitched book I had made at the same time (which was printed in Spain) came to me completely flat (looking like the MyPublisher book above) and with the cover cut correctly. The problems didn't end there; inside I found the B&W pictures looked like poor quality photocopies and seemed to have had the brightness turned way up (an almost-black background in one picture had objects plainly visible). I can say the printing problems are not normally what I see in Lulu books. I did send in a support request but couldn't be bothered following it through as this was only a test book for this article - no point in having it reprinted.

Now for some comments on the pages.

Lulu is rather problematic. Books printed in the US and Spain are fine as far as pictures go. Books printed in the UK are only just passable. Lulu's printer in the UK uses a matt paper and all the inks used are semi-gloss except for black. Black prints glossy and it really detracts from the quality and is rather unsightly. Black and the colours should be the same, otherwise looking at pictures under most lighting conditions shows reflections in just the black sections. Even black text suffers from this problem making it harder to read. Lulu UK also uses matt paper which doesn't help matters with a shiny ink.

Here are two samples that attempt to demonstrate this (although it is very difficult to photographically reproduce the problem one sees when handling and viewing the book):

Lulu - reflection off blacks. Blurb - much more diffuse reflection.


Blurb is generally hard to fault. The paper is matt and the inks are appropriate for the paper. It looks a professional job.

MyPublisher uses a semi-gloss paper. Again, the inks are suitable for the type of paper.

Text

The results are very interesting. Here are portions of some B&W text at standard point sizes, reduced in size after being scanned in at 600 DPI (the text is justified differently because of the different page widths for each book):

Lulu Text Blurb Text
MyPublisher Text

And here are some details, scanned in at 600 DPI:

Lulu text on IGen 3 Blurb text on IGen 3
MyPublisher text on Indigo Original 300 DPI JPEG resized to 600DPI

Lulu's reproduction is far and away the best - it's almost like the original JPEG text. This is interesting because the printer is exactly the same as that used for the Blurb example. The differences appear to be due to the RIP (conversion from PDF to the format needed inside the printer). Possibly there may be some ghosting in the Blurb and MyPublisher samples caused by JPEG compression, although it's hard to say. MyPublisher is very noisy and pretty awful for text. This can easily be seen on the printed page under normal lighting. Indeed, I can see the Blurb fuzziness at normal reading distance (one reason I started investigating this issue). Thanks to the screen noise the text from MyPublisher is also not as contrasty and thus harder to read.

Next I looked at coloured text. Here are the samples:

Lulu Text IGen 3 Blurb Text IGen 3 MyPublisher Text Indigo

Generally the text colours are correctly reproduced across all books. This is somewhat deceiving at this reduced scale on the screen. In the Blurb book the yellow looks off. Let's see the details:

Lulu Text IGen3 Blurb Text IGen3 Blurb Text Indigo MyPublisher Indigo Original JPEG upscaled to 600DPI

Now we can see the real story. Under normal lighting I find the yellow text in the two Blurb books looks slightly greenish (it doesn't appear so in the reduced size images of all the coloured text above because the resizing removes the printing screen dots). At full size there appears to be quite a bit of input from one of the other colours (it looks like the cyan screen). If you stand back from your monitor you can see that the correct yellow is not being printed by either of Blurb's printers, yet it is correct on Lulu's IGen 3 and on MyPublisher's Indigo.


Colour

Here are some samples of coloured glass. These are reduced size scans:

Lulu IGen3 Blurb IGen 3 Blurb Indigo
MyPublisher Indigo Original JPEG

Colour reproduction is generally good. Blurb has problems with yellows as noted above (and at this scale not noticable due to rescaling of the screens). Lulu's reds aren't as punchy. Only MyPublisher's Indigo printer has nailed the blue completely, Lulu is close - and Blurb wants to make some blues into purple!

Now let's see the details:

Lulu IGen 3 Blurb IGen 3 Blurb Indigo
MyPublisher Indigo Original JPEG resized from 300 to 600 DPI

Lulu is clearly the winner here. I've heard people rave about the HP Indigo and how much better it is than the IGen 3. Sorry - not on the samples I have. All I can fault with the Lulu print is the reds; they are somewhat subdued. However, I have a strong feeling that how well a printer does is directly related to how well it has been set up. Look at the Blurb IGen sample - less than optimal! And the Blurb Indigo is even worse. There is a significant drop in detail and the screens are really obvious. In fact, so obvious that they are clearly visible at normal reading distance. Given that Blurb is using the same two printers as the other two companies and their results are inferior to both, I'd have to say it is the way the printer has been set up.

Interestingly the best detail is to be found in the MyPublisher sample; it's reproducing what can be seen in the JPEG. Lulu is close and the screen is far less obvious. Blurb is a distant third on both printers; lacking in the subtle detail and with obvious dots (look at the shaded area of the red). Blurb's black reproduction also leaves a lot to be desired.

Conclusions

These conclusions are related to printing alone inside the books (I've ignored covers as these are usually printed by different printers again). Fit and finish, shipping times, and customer service are another subject and I'll let someone else review those!

None of the three POD companies is perfect for producing coffee-table photo books with text at the present time. All have problems which are quite evident, even when not examing them at microscopic detail as done here. Fortunately none of these problems appears to be insoluble, although they do rely on the companies doing something about improving their printing.

Text:  Lulu is by far the best option. Blurb is fair, but could obviously do a lot better. MyPublisher - forget it!

Pictures: Lulu is the best option if your book is printed in the US or Spain. That black reflective ink that the UK printer seems to insist on using sinks the deal for those who live in the United Kingdom. MyPublisher is the best if you have no text in your book. Blurb would be excellent if they could match the results from the others.

Overall, the books are passable but there is much room for improvement.