This book was created for a valued client using Blurb BookSmart 2.0.2.29291

It arrived with a number of manufacturing defects. See YouTube video and photos below for details. Suffice it to say, this falls well below my quality standards and I’m now questioning whether to continue using Blurb for my photography work.

1. Puncture damage to back cover – there was no damage whatsoever to the outer packaging, so this must have occurred prior to shipping.

2. The pages are bound in reverse order. The first page is the last page and vice versa, and the Left-Right layouts are all reversed.

This page shown above is meant to be the very first page (a right-hand page) and instead it’s the very last (left hand) page. Note also that’s it’s not full bleed. This is a generic Booksmart page ‘fill’ – there’s no reason for the white border.

Pic above: all the Right-left layouts are backwards to how they appear in BookSmart. The ‘Pugtastic’ page is meant to be on the right, and the copyright info page to its left. Note again how the automatic fill color of the title page is not full bleed.

3. There is a huge white margin in the gutter, even on pages that are set up to be full bleed.

Pic above: this image was set up to be full bleed, yet there’s a one inch white margin in the gutter (this appears on every page in the book, and affects all ‘full bleed’ pages).

This is the BookSmart layout for the above page, showing how the image container is set to take up the entire page for a full bleed image.

4. There are remnants of text in the gutter on every spread.

Above pic: I presume the fact that this text is showing means the pages have been cropped severely badly, which also accounts for the so-called “full bleed” images having a one-inch white margin in the gutter?

5. Custom logo on last page is cropped rather than fitting into placeholder

This page looked fine when I uploaded it. I specfically checked and double checked this because I was concerned that BookSmart would handle the custom logo properly. Something has obviously been lost in translation. The logo on page 2 looks fine, but the one on the last page has gone funny.