I've always been a geek and a reader,” says Eileen Gittins, tech entrepreneur and founder of Blurb.com. “[When I was] growing up in California, my mother taught the Great Books at schools around San Rafael. But we were also the type of family who was devoted to Star Trek and fought over who got to read the latest Dune book first.”
As a student at San Francisco State in the late 1970s, Gittins developed an interest in the confluence of photography and technology. After graduating in 1981, she took a sales job with Eastman Kodak. At first, the avid photographer was enamored by the perk of free film and paper, but when she bought her first computer in 1983, it changed her perspective on what the future looked like for taking pictures.
“Digital photography was just starting to emerge in the labs, and I segued over to the imaging and software side of the business,” she says. Moving to Europe, she helped launch dozens of products for Kodak before returning to California, where she started to surf the first dot-com wave, serving as CEO of a pair of startups: Personify, an e-commerce data-mining company, and Verb, a context-based search engine. After the Web 1.0 crash, she found herself in-between jobs and with some time to return to photography. She gave herself the project of photographing and interviewing her former employees and colleagues.
“They all had great stories to tell,” says Gittins. “So, I had about 40 or 50 of these amazing stories from people and was trying to think of a way to say thank you to them. Of course, my first instinct was to put up a Web site. But that didn't feel right. Then I realized what I really wanted to do was a book.” The year was 2003 and self-published books were still expensive and inconvenient to produce. It was then that she knew what her next startup would be: Blurb.com, an online company that would make it easy for content creators, in particular photographers, to self-publish high-quality books in small print runs for low cost.
It took Gittins three years and some $12 million in capital investment before Blurb officially launched in November 2006. The site's key element is a piece of slick downloadable software called BookSmart, which allows users to easily design and lay out books. It is user-friendly and easily compensates for common errors, such as overzoomed and pixilated photographs.
Gittins's first book published with Blurb wasn't her compendium of former colleagues but a series on Napa she put together in five hours to test the Blurb workflow. “When I held that first book in my hand,” she says, “it was a revelation: I was holding my company in my hands.” Today, Blurb has 52 employees and is, according to Gittins, “already profitable” with “double-digit millions in the bank” and revenue of about $30 million. A key element of Blurb's success has been its implementation of Web 2.0 tactics to attract users, including crowd-sourcing content for original Blurb books, using Twitter to organize real-world gatherings and the launch of Blurb Nation, an online matchmaking service for writers, designers and photographers who want to share or hire services. An online Blurb bookstore offers users books for sale, and Gittins may explore an online affiliate program. There are no plans to distribute titles through physical bookstores, but Gittins says they are looking into some alternative retail options. Through 2008, Blurb had produced almost one million books.
Although Blurb seems like it could pose a threat to the business model of the traditional book business, Gittins insists publishing is not a “zero sum game.” In fact, she's trying to educate herself about conventional book publishing and has hired former Rodale editor Leigh Haber as a guide. What's more, Gittins is in discussions with New York publishers about forming partnerships, though she declines to offer specific examples as no agreements have yet been reached.
“I hope that the industry continues to look for ways to transform itself,” says Gittins, who sees her company as an evolution rather than replacement of the current model. “People have stories to tell and they just want to leverage the latest and greatest ways of getting their stories out there,” she says, adding, “What our company does is so old, it's new. Offline is the new online.”
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