BlookUp Reviews 13

I created several Blooks from our personal WordPress blog, and BlookUp seemed to be one of the few services that could handle self-hosted WP sites.

The interface is cute, the templates look alright at first sight. Trying to design a larger project however was tedious and time consuming, as the entire Blook preview has to get re-rendered after each design step to get an accurate preview of how it falls onto the final pages.

There's NO LIVE PREVIEW while editing. The web-based interface does have a preview, but once you re-render the Blook, text may jump onto the next page unexpectedly, or do other template-based adjustments independently. After working on my Blooks for more than a week, I had a good handle on *predicting* those content shifts, but I still had to sit and WAIT while re-rendering the Blook preview every few steps to confirm that the content is still on track.

Printing and shipping from France to U.S. was faster than expected, but VERY expensive, compared to other services. Furthermore, the print quality was disappointing. About 10-15% darker than expected, and I am using U.S. based digital printing services all the time and have a well-calibrated monitor. Many shadows filled up, and the mid- and skin tones got much too intense.

Still, after all my work, I paid to keep the blooks in their cloud for a year, with the intention to re-print more copies later for other family members.

I missed the 1-year mark by a couple of weeks, but assumed that I might have gotten charged another annual fee automatically, as BlookUp didn't send any reminder that the cloud-based storage time comes to an end. No automatic billing by default, which would be standard for any other cloud-based data storage contract (both for the sake of customer data preservation and continuous income source of the host company!)

Thankfully, the three Blooks were still listed on my account view, so I renewed my cloud storage contract and ordered re-prints ... only to learn that the data might have gotten deleted regardless. My three books could neither get printed nor re-rendered on the account side of the interface.

BlookUp customer service doesn't seem to be of much help, only suggesting that I try again to restore the Blooks on my account page. I did, and it still didn't work, so something is disconnected on their server side. They have been ghosting me for the past 2 weeks, but still hold on to several hundred $$$ of re-printing fees and cloud storage fees from 5 weeks ago.

I think the template is limited and I think they need to make another Blookup Website for All Social Media, Not just Facebook and Facebook fanpages and Twitter and Blogs and PDF Files and Instagram & Twitter but all Social Media. Youtube, Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, Instagram and TikTok and so on.

I was extremely disappointed with blookup. The template is limited and very unwieldy to work with. Unless you do extensive editing, the spacing throughout the book is poor. For instance you can’t amend photos to fill a page or make them smaller to fit on a page. Thus, there ends up being a lot of dead space and you have to manually move things around (or cut things out) to make your book look good – which takes a long time if you have a decent size blog.

The template requires books to printed in different volumes, which is fine, but then the volumes aren’t appropriately labelled and when such is attempted to be added to the title it gets cut off.

They only allow 50 characters for a title and the cover page template allows little flexibility. I did not realise the 50 character limit (it doesn’t warn of this in the template) and thus, I received my books without their full titles. When I queried this and asked it to be rectified, they stated that there was nothing they could do and did not offer any resolution to fix.

Thus, I’m left with some expensive books that don’t even have my full blog title – good thing I only purchased one copy as a test and didn’t print out the full run.

Bottom line – There are better blog to book services that allow more flexibility and don’t take days to edit. TAKE YOUR BUSINESS ELSEWHERE!

I had Blookup print hardbound copies of my whole blog, which covered several years and over 400 entries. That required five volumes, the way I initially started having them print the set. I made the mistake of trying to have them print the volumes strictly by year, as I did for the first two volumes. However, I reverted to letting them cram the remaining years into only three volumes. I would have paid far more dearly for the remainder of the second part of the printing had I not allowed Blookup to combine them. Do NOT have them print your set piecemeal, by year, as that ends up being significantly more expensive.

They migrated my blogspot blog to Blookup, so some of these results might vary when compared with a different blog source.

1. They do NOT put volume # on spine.
2. Be gentle with your hard cover binding. I've seen less expensive hardbound children's books that are more durably made.
3. They produce POOR punctuation spacing migration from blog to book. They favor using huge spacing to fill some lines. Looks bad, hard to read.
4. They produce POOR word spacing migration from blog to book. Looks bad, hard to read.
5. They produce POOR paragraph spacing migration from blog to book. Looks bad, hard to read.
6. The cost is VERY expensive per book.
7. Especially expensive per book, IF you segregate blog entries by year per book.
8. Good quality paper.

Excellent service; easy to use and very pleased with the final product. I had been trying for two years to print a blog of a trip we took with no success until I found this site. It was very simple to use, even for an older, not too-computer-savvy individual! Thanks!

We have been using Blookup for about three years. The service is friendly and excellent. First printing out a Blog, we have now branched out into favorite poems, song lyrics and much more, all finely illustrated. These are all easily downloaded from free Google blog space.

Recently the software has been improved, with more options. There is a fine selection of sizes to choose from.

Very pleased. The finished product is very professional.

First the good news; 1) BlookUp's software made it easy and quick to complete the book from my posts. I usually use another company but they had software problems 2) The book arrived on time 3) The book arrived un-damaged, carefully packed, if anything TOO carefully packed. Took ages to open. But 4) The size was much larger than I wanted & for some reason there was lots of empty unused space in the final book, leading to more pages & more expensive (no options for smaller) 5) The quality: poor printing quality and especially layout in my opinion. I wish them well, but would not order from them again, unless the printing quality improved - i.e., formatting, photo quality and layout --and I did not have other options.