Online book publishing service Blurb today launched a new way to publish collections of photos – as an eBook for the iPad. The new eBooks come in templated or custom two-page layouts, which readers can swipe through, search the text of and zoom into full resolution images.
Publishers pay $1.99 per book and get to keep 100% of the profit beyond that cost. Paper books from Blurb start at $10 each to print on demand. Two buck easy-to-make eBook publishing on demand sounds awesome.
At launch the eBooks live in Apple’s iBook app, for easy offline reading, but the company says it aims to expand out onto other platforms soon. The Blurb Instagram app is also capable of publishing collections of Instagram photos to eBook format.
There’s no mention on the site of whether the books will be DRM-free or not, but I sure hope so. (Update: Blurb lead engineer for digital books Michael Murray tells us the ebooks are 100% DRM free.) The company says it will be making a more detailed announcement about the new eBook program soon. All the example eBooks in the announcement are letterboxed on horizontal view, too. That doesn’t seem ideal to me.
You should post titles of your awesome Blurb eBooks in comments below, and if you’re selling them for $2.00, I’ll go buy some of them. Heck, price them at $4 and I’ll buy a couple a month. Easy and cheap publishing for a widely used and attractive consumption platform sounds like a beautiful thing.
