Blurb Announces Partnership with Amazon to Simplify Self-Publishing Photo Books

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As of Yesterday, Blurb — an online platform and service that allows you to create and publish photo books — announced that you will now be able to sell and distribute said photo books through none other than online retail giant, Amazon, regardless of how many copies are sold.

This is considerably big news, as it opens up an entirely new realm of possibilities for photographers who want to get some of their work out there in the form of printed books, but don’t have the means to desire to go through more traditional methods of ordering massive quantities and trying to get those sold.

As said by Blurb CEO, Eileen Gittins:

Self-publishing photographers want to be on Amazon; it’s today’s equivalent of being in a high street shop. We will facilitate the whole thing: get the book an ISBN and print it on demand – there’s no minimum print run, The only difference [to using Blurb’s online shop] is that Amazon has some fees attached [a 15% “referral fee” of the products price].

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For those wanting to go big, Gittens also explains that Blurb will store any prints that go over 300 copies in a warehouse for six months:

If you live in a flat in Shoreditch, you can’t possibly house 8 crates of books in your apartment. And then what’s going to happen when someone want to buy them? You have no facility to take their money, let alone go to the post office and ship them. So for 35 to 50 cents per unit, depending on the size of the book, we will warehouse that for you and fulfill it for you, meaning we will pull it off the shelf and do all of the systems work for you. This is radical transformation of what it means now to really self publish and to really have a level playing field.

Leveling the playing field is absolutely right. This new team effort from Amazon and Blurb is to photo books as the Kindle and Amazon’s platform was to text-based writers. It’ll be interesting to see how this changes things, but it’s certainly good news all around, as leveling the playing field for getting such publications out there is always welcomed.

(via Telegraph)

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