Turn Those Bytes Into Books By PETER WAYNER

April 17, 2008
Basics
Turn Those Bytes Into Books By PETER WAYNER
THE first time Jeannet Leendertse, a freelance book designer, saw the software on the Blurb.com Web site that could automatically produce a book, she was more than a little sad. “I thought I needed to have a stiff drink for the end of my career,” she said.

The software could help anyone turn some text and photos into a bound book in a few minutes.

Soon after, though, she saw an opportunity. “I realized there would always be people who appreciate time and effort going into design. I decided to put myself onto their Web site.”

Today, Ms. Leendertse still turns a pile of pictures and paragraphs into bound books, but instead of working just for a roster of major publishers like MIT Press, she helps individuals create books. She is participating in an offshoot of the scrapbooking phenomena, the hobby of collecting and preserving photos and mementos.

What was once a pastime for mothers recording family memories for their children has blossomed into a new, fertile marketplace of collaboration. People with stories to tell are creating personalized books filled with pictures, blog entries and even business proposals. While some of these glorified scrapbooks are aimed at the world at large, many new titles were never intended to be sold in stores or marketed in any way. For instance, architects submitting bound proposals for their projects have used some of the scrapbooking tools.

The digital tools — the camera, scanner and word processor — have opened the field of book creation to the amateur as the hobby moves away from pasting buttons and rickrack onto pages. But sometimes the bookmakers need a little help. Ms. Leendertse recently worked with the filmmaker Robert Gardner, who told her: “This is the artwork that I have. This is my story. How do you think the artwork tells the story best?”

She said he gave her access to his archives and they worked together to create “The Impulse to Preserve,” a 384-page book on Mr. Gardner’s philosophy of creating films. She organized the content and arranged the pages of the book. Soon afterward, a publisher, Other Press, saw the design and agreed to publish her finished work.

Suzzanne Connolly, a San Francisco-based book designer at Picturia Press (www.picturiapress.com), says couples who want to bind the pictures from their wedding day come to her with elaborate plans. “We decide on the layout, the color, the fonts and the style and the flow of each book,” she said. “We can find illustrators, photographers and writers for our clients if it is called for.”

One of her projects was a 52-page 7- by-7-inch soft-cover book with black-and-white photos of a man’s huskies, including one that had just died. In another project, she converted a mother’s blog into a 116-page hardcover book.

“She writes practically every day and takes lots of pictures,” Ms. Connolly said. “She wanted to convert her blog into a book so that when her children grew up they would have something wonderful to look at for each year of their lives.”

Scrapbookers have long been haunting sites that sell or give away digital designs, templates and illustrations. The book creators find them useful as well. Some of the most popular are theshabbyshoppe.com, scrappydoodlekits.com, rakscraps.com, peppermintcreative.com and escrappers.com. Some offer free samples while charging for more elaborate versions. Digitalfreebies.com, for instance, distributes a number of free files each Friday while charging $24.95 a year for access to the archives of past releases.

Katie Pertiet, the creative director for DesignerDigitals.com, sells new downloadable artwork for scrapbookers from a Web site she runs with her husband from her home. Last year, she herself created five different books with more than 400 illustrated pages filled with photos and stories about her children and grandchildren.

Every Sunday morning she shares some of these designs with her customers. Some are produced by Ms. Pertiet and others by artists who license their art to the site. She estimates that she sells about 700 packages each Sunday.

Much of the material can only be described as artsy-craftsy and might not work as well for a self-published book on Bauhaus architecture. One set selling for $2.50 comes with images of the alphabet as if it were cut out of felt and sewn on top of red felt apples. Another set selling for $3.99 includes silhouettes of leafless tree branches and spooky birds, “just in time for Halloween.”

A buyer can take these 300-dots-per-inch images and mix them together with their own images or words, cutting and pasting digital versions much as someone would cut and paste actual scraps of fabric and paper.

“What’s popular is creating scrapbook pages that look like they were done with paper,” Ms. Pertiet said. “They get the effects of regular scrapbooking with no mess, no clean-up, no running out of the letter E. They can reuse them over and over.”

Book creators use Adobe Photoshop (about $650), but others find the simpler and less expensive Photoshop Elements (about $100) adequate. Some amateur bookmakers prefer focused scrapbooking software like Nova Development’s Art Explosion Scrapbook Factory (novadevelopment.com) selling for about $40. As the name might imply, the package comes with thousands of fonts, illustrations, templates and “photorealistic embellishments” like pictures of buttons, ribbons or charms.

There are also a number of crossover tools that straddle the line between printed works and multimedia presentations. Smilebox.com, for instance, specializes in scrapbooks and photo albums that can be sent by e-mail or printed on paper. Basic templates are free, but the company also licenses premium versions from professional artists. Customers can either purchase a single license or join Club Smilebox, a monthly all-inclusive subscription that costs $4.99 a month.

Companies that print bound books also offer free programs. Blurb.com and Picaboo.com distribute free software with all the tools needed to start a book. They expect to make money when users upload the final versions to their Web sites and order printed versions. A 7- by-7-inch soft- cover book from Blurb.com starts at $13 for 20 to 40 pages, with extra pages additional. Bigger, fatter books like a 150-page 13-by-11-inch hardcover cost $85. There are volume discounts. Picaboo.com sells some 20-page soft-cover books for $10 and offers a variety of bound books including ones covered with linen or padded leather.

Even with those do-it-yourself tools, the services of a professional might be needed. And they can also be found on sites like www.blurb.com/blurb_nation or www.lulu.com/budgetbookdesign. Many have their clients’ work on display. Editors who make simple grammatical corrections start at around $300 while more thorough editing and rewriting can cost more than $750 and up. Simple formatting and cover design can begin at $200. Prices vary widely depending upon the designer and the amount of time that a project might require, but it’s not unusual to hear of projects that cost more than $5,000.

Eileen Gittins, the chief executive and founder of Blurb.com, says that her site is working on nurturing a culture around creating books by cultivating relationships between the amateurs and the professionals. “We’re finding that books are this very interesting way for people who want to meet up. People want to see each other’s books,” she said. “We realized we had the beginnings of a marketplace here.”

Sorry, but they don’t help you find an agent or a publisher.