Finally finished the 2009 Adventure book – (Preview Book). 470 Photos in 240 pages using BookSmart by blurb.com. This is the third year I have used blurb.com to produce our custom print on demand annual. A new feature of the application I really enjoyed this year is that you can now edit the fixed layouts and create your own new custom layouts. I didn’t use that feature as much as I would like to have done on this years book mainly because of the rush to get it out. I intended to do more customization going forward. If I can just discipline myself to build this thing each month vs. the entire thing at the end of the year.
I’ve been doing Genealogical research for the a while now and one of the best resources I have found are rare out of print books that have been digitized by books.google.com.Project Gutenberg and archive.org. And even with those resources, you may not be able to find a digital copy. Suppose you want a real hard back copy? Many of these books are extremely hard to find and are only available in reference sections of a few libraries. In some instances you might get lucky and find them at rare book stores or used book aggregation sites, like abebooks.com, alibris.com, biblio.com or bookfinder.com. But in these cases they will likely cost hundreds of dollars. And in many circumstances, you are simply out of luck.
Enter Kirtas.com and their start-up division www.kirtasbooks.com. They have combined specialized book scanning equipment that they sell with partnerships with some of the biggest libraries in the country, like the New York Public Library and University of Pennsylvania Library to offer nearly 1,000,000 titles. Check out the video below explaining what they do.
I ordered 4 books from them recently and I am simply astounded at the quality of the product I received for the money. Two of the books I ordered they already had digitized, the other to were digitized for me. Somebody at the New York library pulled the books, scanned them and then sent them to Kirtasbooks.com. They, in turn, had them printed and hard bound for my order. 3 Weeks later I had my own beautify hard bound copies of books I could have affordability owned no other way. I had to pinch myself to make sure it was real. The books cost me $20 each when I ordered them. They have since raised the price to $28 each.
