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Making Your Own Coffee Table Book

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Remember when ordering prints online and posting photo albums on the Web were revolutionary? The latest rage in online photo sharing is creating your very own photo album, one that’s printed on glossy paper and hardbound like a real book.

The coffee table-style photo book, available from myPublisher.com, makes an ideal gift for family and friends. You choose the pictures, design the layout, select photo borders, and more in a book of 10 to 50 pages. It’s one of the coolest ways yet to share your digital photographs.

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Getting Started

You must register and join to use the myPublisher.com service, but it’s free to build a book. You only pay when you place an order. To ensure maximum quality, before posting photos review the site’s uploading and scanning guidelines. Their suggestions help ensure that your pictures look their best. Only JPEG format photos are accepted. Any significant photo editing, color balancing, grayscale conversion, cropping, and so forth that you want to do should be done before uploading.

If you have prints from film that you’d like to include in a book, simply digitize them by using a flatbed scanner. If you don’t have a scanner, myPublisher.com offers a print scanning service. Print sizes must be between 2 x 3 inches and 10 x 12 inches.

As you place photos during the book ordering process, myPublisher.com automatically gauges whether the photo has sufficient resolution for the size selected. If the photo contains too few pixels for the chosen space, alternate smaller sizes are recommended to maximize printed quality. Like most things in photography, the quality of the final product rests on the axiom of garbage in, garbage out.

Release Your Inner Artist

Once your pictures are uploaded, the fun begins. You don’t have to be a graphics professional to create a beautiful book. The framing, layout, and text options are easy to use. Photo borders come in different styles and colors, and you can stylize each image by softening corners, blurring edges, creating ovals, and more. You can also mix and match layout types throughout the book; it isn’t necessary to stick with one look for all pages of the book.

You have two choices for building a book: you can go with a pre-built layout, or you can opt for a custom design. The pre-built layout is designed to be the quick and easy route to a finished book. As such, you’re presented with fewer options than if you take the customized approach. You can also build and store multiple book layouts. Regardless of what layouts or design options you choose, the cost of a book works out to about US$3-4 per page, with discounts for multiple copies ordered at the same time.

Before You Print

It’s critical that you preview your book before completing the order. This is your final opportunity to ensure the photos are exactly where you want them, the captions are free of typographical errors, that all borders are in order, and that the cover looks the way you envisioned. Even seasoned graphic designers are known to miss a thing or two the first time through, so preview carefully to prevent costly and disappointing mistakes.

If you want to take the book upmarket, explore some of the optional extras. They include a leather cover in place of the standard linen one. A book jacket and slipcase are also available.

Once your order is placed, myPublisher.com indicates it takes up to 10 business days to process, print, and bind your book, though you’ll likely see your order dispatched sooner than that.

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