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Print Books From Your Flickr Photosets

This is frickin' cool - Qoop can print sadlle-stitched or perfect-bound books of your photos from Flickr. The price is reasonable when you consider you're getting a perfect-bound paperback on glossy print at 8 x 10 or 8.5 x 11 size. 28 pages starting at $15.95.

I've been working out the economics of short-run printing for full color for a while and I have yet to make it work out like it does for black and white printing. For runs of tens to a hundred color books you're still better off with a good inkjet or laser printer and some decent paper and taking it to a print shop for binding. But if you just want a couple books of your pictures, this is a great deal. I may upload some of the thousands of flora and fauna pictures I've got and see what the quality of the book is like.

The application-as-platform model allows for so much mixing and matching of services that possibilities pop up overnight as people get ideas. A simple application for managing photos has been extended repeatedly in unexpected ways, providing a glimpse at the potential of this type of software architecture. I wish IT shops and IT vendors would spend more time architecting their solutions to fit into a real SOA model, rather than the legacy-wrapper lip service we see in most applications. SOA is a mostly a marketing label for them, akin to "New and Improved With More Bleach!" stickers.

On a side note, it's too bad that Yahoo bought Flickr, and now Yahoo is starting to demonstrate corporate evil.

Posted by Mark Wednesday, September 07, 2005 3:45:00 PM | permalink |

Comments:

We'll be adding one-off smythe sewn hardbound books to the mix in about a month. Base price should be $24.99 for 24 pages. And we'll have a fleet of self-publishing sales tools with our on-demand production behind them so that authors can sell their works in softback or hardback. Thanks for the mention! Phil

# posted by  Anonymous : 7:28 PM

 

This is getting even better. I can't wait to try out the service this fall.

# posted by  Mark : 8:49 PM

 

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