I've been taking a look at the Blurb.com web site, and I'm coming up completely blank on costs. They have a link on their site for "Pricing" but, when I click on it -- it takes me to a blank, white screen. On-line reviews seem to agree that Blurb.com produces high quality books but that the printing cost is so high that it makes books unsaleable if there's to be any mark-up whatsoever. That's bad enough, but I haven't been able to determine if there is an up-front cost, like on IngramSpark, to publish a book through Blurb.com, or if Blurb makes all its money from the printing cost. Does anyone know?
I'd try to access that page again. It works for me, and there's a ton of pricing information there, too much to summarize here.
When i was doing wedding photography I used Blurb for wedding albums, but they arent a serious contender for publishing IMO unless maybe you are doing a coffee table book with lots of photos and a very high retail price i can't help you on the question of upfront costs vs POD because i just bought the albums from blurb and provided them to clients, so they werent doing my fulfillment for me incidentally their pricing page won't load for me in firefox but loads fine in chrome
you might find some decent leads here: https://mwichary.medium.com/my-experiences-printing-a-small-batch-of-books-c04141b63dfe this person was looking for 15 copies of a hardcover 100 page book and did a whole rundown on what four different printers offered. You'll probably find that one of these businesses will be the right one to print a couple of books for you.
That may be the problem. I use Waterfox (a Firefox fork) as my browser. I find Chrome to be hopelessly brain dead and I won't allow it on my computer. My view has evolved to one of deciding that any company that can't be bothered to ensure that their web site works with all modern, current browsers is a company that I don't want or need to deal with.
An interesting review -- thanks for the link. Not what I'm looking for, though. I'm not interested in printing a few copies of a book for personal consumption, I'm trying to compare costs for getting books set up for sale as print-on-demand offerings to the general public.
The realistic options for that are KDP print and Ingram Spark... most of the other credible POD providers are using ingram as their printer anyway so you just add costs by going with them. Blurb are primarily a photobook provider who added other POD options to expand their offer, but its not their core business The other option of course is a print run and doing your own fulfillment... that can work out cheaper per unit, but there are significant downsides on storage, time, and sunk costs... i wouldn't recommend it unless you have a captive audience - like if you were an influencer with a big following, or someone who people regularly come to see speak and can make sales at your talks
