There are a lot of people at SXSW hawking a range of new ideas and as you’d expect, some of them are better than others. One of our favs here was online personal publisher Blurb.
Blurb can publish one off books (or multiple copies) and the quality is professional grade. We got up close and personal with a sample copy and you can bet the first thing we did was look at the half toning as closely as possible. In a nutshell, we were pretty impressed.

While the sample we had was that glossy coffee table book stock we are not particularly fond of, the printing quality was top notch. We were told they are planning to offer a variety of paper options and we got to inspect a hard back cover that looked as high quality as any mass produced book we’ve seen.

Blurb provides it’s own software publishing system that works on Mac or PC, and you can import layouts from iphoto or indesign. You can also import flickr photostreams, entire posts from your blog, and invite friends to submit photos.

We think this is a godsend for any artists (photographers in particular) who want to self publish. They also offer drop shipping, so you can sell a book on your site, and send the order to Blurb who will make a copy and ship it to customers for you. We expect to see a lot of this in the near future, if you’d like to get started you can check out the options at Blurb.com.