Want to back-up your BookSmart book files, share an in-progress book with an editor, collaborator, or even your pet? Just kidding about that last part. Exporting your book creates a single file that can easily be burned to a CD, copied to a new computer, or passed to a friend that has BookSmart installed as well. Here’s how:
1. Open your book in Blurb BookSmart™
2. Select “Export Book” from the File Menu
3. Choose where you’d like to save your book on your computer. This will create a file with a .book extension.
4. This .book file is self-contained book including all images and text. Burn this to a CD as an archive or copy to a different computer. If you have a co-author or friend with BookSmart they can take this .book file and make revisions to the book much in the same way you would with a Word or PowerPoint document.
5. The final step is opening the book in BookSmart. First, start up BookSmart. If a book is already open select “Import Book” from the File Menu. If no book is open press the “Import Book” button on the Welcome Screen.
That should do it.
What else are people doing with their book exports? Tell me.
24 Comments
Someone sent me this excellent way of backing up all Blurb books, on a Mac:
Locate the BookSmartData folder which can be found in your user folder (typically labeled with your name and identified by a small house icon). Open the “Library Folder,” then the “Application Support” folder. This folder contains another folder named “BookSmartData.” Make a copy of the BookSmartData folder to back-up your books. Note: Do not move this folder, as BookSmart won’t be able to open your books.
Related to backing up files, I’d encourage Blurb users to write to Blurb.com and encourage them to enhance the installation process so we have the choice of drive on which to install the software. Right now it is only C: and I can’t remember the last time I did a software install, large or small, that didn’t give a choice of drive.
I’ve written to Blurb.com tech support about this and the reply is that they are thinking about it. Hearing from others may make the difference. I hope they’ve designed the template software so that adding such a feature would be trivial to program, perhaps involving just a Registry setting in Windows.
This feature is GREAT. For anyone who can’t imagine a situation where this would be handy, I worked with my wedding photographer to put together a photo album for our wedding. I’m a graphic designer, so naturally I wanted to design the book. However, the high-res versions of all our wedding photos were kinda off limits to me (until I purchased them). So I ended up designing the book with “FPO” photos, then sending it to the photographer to replace them with the full-sized versions.
In this situation, I was on a Mac, and she was on a PC — so the BookSmartData transfer way wouldn’t have worked.
WONDERFUL!
Hi Roscoe - Your suggestion is definitely on our list of BookSmart improvements. I can’t give you a timeline of when we’ll get to it (you should see our list!), but we will be looking at it soon. Thanks!
I’d like to add to Roscoe’s comment. I’d also like to be able to build the library on an external drive. Much like iphoto or Aperture let’s you choose where to store the files created. This would free up space on my laptop for processing the books.
Thanks!
Ditto. I found it strange that I could not assign where the application was going to reside… AND…. where my book projects were going to reside. Anyone truely managing their system doesn’t put everything on their C drive. I would much prefer to pick and choose where files and folders where going to reside.
For Mac users, there is an easy workaround to change the location of your book project data. You can put your BookSmartData folder wherever you want in your file system and create a symbolic link named “BookSmartData” under (your home)/Library/Application Support/ folder. This works for me so far.
Please Blurb allow the uer to specify where the book data is stored.
I configured my system so that NO data is on my C drive, instead it is on a separate data drive. However, now along comes Book-NotSo-Smart and puts the dam data files on C without so much as a please-may-I. This is just bad design in this day and age.
Another issue is that the raw photos should be kept available in their original format, instead of trying to hide them by reallocating their extension as .ORIGINAL. Also when the photos are stored, all their metadata is stripped out. When a project is over I want to archive a complete copy of the project with the original photos.
I want to save my book (ade woth Blurb) as pdf… How can I do?
Hi Monica. the short answer is no, but here’s more info on work-arounds.
You guys should have a flash and PDF export thingie, without the watermarks. Cause we invest so much time creating a book that we should have the option to export it. I don´t care if you charge 5 bucks or something. Just do it please!
Ditto - I too would love to see a proper PDF export function… I want to be able to proof a book and show it to others without watermarks and with the cover. Booksmart is a marginal layout program at best, with lots of limitations, quirks and bugs, but If I use Blurb to print my books, out of necessity, I spend a lot of time building (and re-building) a book with it - so please allow us the small luxury of proofing our books properly.
I just finished creating a book, ordered a copy last night (so the downloading on your site is complete), and then this morning my hard drive crashed. It appears to me to unrelated to the book — just a good old fashioned hardware problem. My associate at work wants to be able to review my book, and I’d like her to have access to it. How can this be done - my computer is dead, and I’m getting a new one tomorrow.
Thanks.
Tom,
Sounds like a question for Customer Support. Please contact them using this form.
Good luck with retrieving your book.
– Kathy
With a multiplicity of book publishing programs available, Blurb needs to quickly make the program available to be saved to any drive on the computer. Many computers “time-out” at a 20-30 MB upload, if someone isn’t on a commercial server. It is alarming to think that one could invest WEEKS or a MONTH programming a 150-300 MB book, and then the system crash or an upload then not be possible. There has to be a way devised to save the book on CD-R and send it in. Right now we are on the verge of ordering books, and then further ordering books for clients, but can predict in advance that we’ll have upload problems due to size of our book(s). This blog does not make it clear as to whether one can move the saved data to another computer and actually SEND it in and upload it from another system after creating the book on our home computer. WE may have to create the book and then FIND somewhere else to upload it from –such as the computer of our computer tech or a friend. It seems that dozens of people have had problems. BookSmart is not unique technology. Other publishers use it. Customers will come back to Blurb for the look of the book covers, the pricing and the web site — versus taking the files elsewhere to print. It makes no sense to have the files restricted to C drives –which no one does anymore. Other publishers also allow you to upload a few pages at a time — uploading by chapters or by pages, in case the system will not upload a 300MB book at once.
In the 60 days that it will take us to complete our text we hope to find a WAY to CONVENIENTLY upload files to you.
Any resolutions or solutions from customers –please advise!
Hi Regina,
To hear solutions from Blurbarians like yourself, I really recommend posting your questions to the Forums. In the interim, I hope you don’t mind hearing from Blurb.
Our model is based on relying on broadband to get your book project from your desktop to our printers and back to you as quickly as possible. Changing the way we do that, either by accepting CDs or other media would be completely counter to our service and not one that we are considering.
That said, if you ever experience problems uploading your book, please contact us immediately. If the information in our Forums or FAQs don’t help solve your upload problem, it becomes our customer support team’s number one goal to solve for you on a one-on-one basis.
And you’re right, the ability to store books on drives other than the primary drive (C: on Windows) is a known limitation with BookSmart, and we are working to address this in a future release.
I hope my answers help.
Thanks for posting!
– Kathy
Hi there,
I’m a wedding photographer in Australia and am looking at offering your books as part of my packages. Being able to show a flash or proper pdf to customers would be really handy. Also I must agree with the comments above that it would be good to choose where to save things. I do love your site though and am very excited about being able to offer beautiful books to my clients.
Here’s a suggestion for the crash/backup dilemma and a way to increase Blurb usability: have the Blurb software web based (on a Blurb server) so an author can log into their book and work on it from anywhere in the world.
I made a book last year and saved a copy of it by copying the BookSmartData folder (as mentioned above). I’ve just now downloaded the latest version of BookSmart and don’t know how to incorporate the folder into the new program folders in order to open the book! I need to order more copies soon. Does anyone know where to place the BookSmartData folder from an older version of BookSmart into the folders of the newer version of BookSmart?!
I want someone else to be able to add pages to my book that they created separately, on their own computer - not just to edit my pages. Is there a way to do this?
everytime i try to import a book file it says that file was not an exported file for version 2 or whatever. if i try to just open them it says they are not valid win32 files. HELP
Not being a computer guru I have a dumb question…If I export my book, is it totally removed from my computer?
Thank you!
Penny
I would also like to rename my book subdirectories and have BookSmart pickup the new names when it’s started.
I found that BookSmart’s backup is much slower than just copying the directory contents using Windows. But if I rename the directory, or create a new one that’s a copy of an existing one, then it doesn’t show up in the list of titles.
I’d could make several more suggestions about the storage interface in BookSmart, including the tiny size of the book selection screen when the program starts. But I’m sure you’ve already heard about these.
I’d like to echo the calls above for proper PDF export.
I’m also a wedding photographer and we create dozens of books a year. Having Blurb.Com on the printed proof makes the whole service useless. I’m not against the watermarking, but if you want to cater to professionals you have to give us more options to remove your branding.