MemoryPress – Publish your family history

DearREADERS,
Ol' Myrt has been communicating all afternoon with Jeff Harmon, who works with a small startup company in Utah called FamilyLearn. They just released a family history product called MemoryPress -- a "start-to-finish solution to publish your personal or family history into a beautiful hardbound book."

Jeff Harmon explained there are 5 things that set MemoryPress apart:

1. Online Collaboration—kind of like Google Docs, MemoryPress lets you collaborate online, but to create your family history.
2. REAL Typesetting —powered by TeX, MemoryPress easily organizes and typesets up 480 page books online! To our knowledge, this has NEVER been done online before.
3. Tech Mash-up—MemoryPress will soon import blogs, MS Word Documents, Online condolences, flickr photos. (Out of these we have only released the flickr import to date.)
4. Really Long Lasting Books—When you print your family history stories you want them to last. Watch what happened when we put a MemoryPress book in the dryer for 45 minutes.
5. Customer Phone Support—Creating a book can be difficult for the non-tech savvy user, it can be difficult to learn drag-&-drop, uploading photos, etc... Give us a call and we will step [you] through it at no extra charge.

"MemoryPress' purpose is to publish Family History books (baby, wedding, memorial, biographies, etc...), archiving them online and making them search-able, while publishing them into traditional book form."

WHY MYRT IS EXCITED ABOUT MemoryPress
We just got back from a big family reunion on Orcas Island, the first one since our mom & step-mom Blanche passed away. YES, our 88-year old dad managed to make the trip, with the help of a higher oxygen concentration each night.

I had already decided to design a book to be printed for Dad with great pictures from the huge collection we’ve gathered, using a variety of digital cameras.

When exploring MemoryPress at FamilyLearn.com Ol' Myrt discovered, we can WORK TOGETHER to get this book compiled. I can invite the other members of the family to be in on the actual composition of memories in both text and photo format. Here’s what I did:

• Set up chapters with place holders for each family group
• Sent an invitation to each family group

FIND OUT MORE
Visiting the MemoryPress website: http://memorypress.familylearn.com/

I particularly value the optional how-to video clip tutorials that pop up when you get to a new section of the book-creating process.

LOOKING AHEAD
Ol' Myrt has planned a podcast interview with Jeff Harmon, to discuss some of the particulars about the MemoryPress options – all seem designed to make your book look GREAT. If you have any questions in the meantime, contact Jeff at: jeffrey@familylearn.com

I was really convinced by the 45-minutes in the dryer test for the quality of the published book and its binding.

Happy family tree climbing!
Myrt :)
DearMYRTLE,
Your friend in genealogy.
Myrt@DearMYRTLE.com
http://www.dearmyrtle.com/

(c) 2007 Pat Richley All Rights Reserved.

Blurb.com's Booksmart Software

Here's a screen shot

DearREADERS,
If you are curious about the software mentioned in my previous blog entry Blurb.com for book publishing here is a screen shot showing the basic elements the free Booksmart software.





Basically you work through the pages in the film-strip area across the bottom of the screen. Click on a page in the film-strip to make that page show up in the largest portion of the Booksmart screen. This is where one edits a page. Note that I have chosen to black for the background color on each page.

Pictures I've pre-selected appear on the lower left half of the screen in the "My Imported Pictures" though I may certainly elect to gather more photos to this list.

Changing the layout of a page is made by choosing options above the picture list in the "Apply Page Layout" area.

Ol' Myrt is VERY excited about this project, particularly since I have seen the results in that book at my doctor's office.

Happy family tree climbing!
Myrt :)
DearMYRTLE,
Your friend in genealogy.
Myrt@DearMYRTLE.com
www.DearMYRTLE.com

(c) 2007 Pat Richley All Rights Reserved.

Blurb.com for book publishing

Using free software to create 4-color books

DearREADERS,
Ol' Myrt was browsing YouTube yesterday and stumbled across this video about the book creating & publishing company called Blurb.com. If you’d like to come up with high-quality color print publication for a 50^th anniversary or the next family reunion, check out the video presented by WebPro News: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_vRAXm5449E

Blurb.com: Using Technology for Traditional Media
produced by WebPro News
No matter how you slice it, digital content will never replace print. In a world where we buy music & movies online and even virtual land goes for big bucks, a page in the hand is still worth a thousand ebooks. In a pleasant break from the norm, some online businesses are embracing this philosophy. Some print photos for family albums from digital sources, some screenprint garage bands' t-shirts from uploaded designs... and some print
entire books.

Blurb is among this breed of new publisher. Yet, unlike traditional publishers, Blurb doesn't sign contracts with authors or otherwise chase talent... they open their doors to everyone. By simply downloading a desktop application (for Windows or Mac), prospective authors and artists can follow simple templates and publish a real book, dust jacket and all.

CEO and founder, Eileen Gittins implies that technology is ripe for such advancements. "If I were starting this business five years ago, it would have been daunting... starting this business now, in 2006... we're able to leverage a lot of technologies that have come before. We're like the grandchild of desktop publishing."

Blurb.com's book-creating process is the method our family physician used to complete a short book of about 20 pages on her family's recent humanitarian trip to South Africa. The Windows version of the software provided by Blurb.com is a 20MB download. It looks a lot like MSPublisher, in that there are layouts with space-holders for pictures and text. The author can copy/paste or type info as desired. I was able to click around to find photos I took during the reunion, in addition to ancestral photos I keep with my genealogy files. Then I merely dragged and dropped the pictures to the place-holders on the page, and the photo was automatically resized to fit the space. It wasn't a problem when I decided to switch layouts in mid-stream. I'd rate the software as "easy for beginners".

My goal now is to make a "coffee table" book about my Dad's April 2007 reunion with his siblings Beverly and Jack, and to share copies with all three of them.

Happy family tree climbing!
Myrt :)
DearMYRTLE,
Your friend in genealogy.
Myrt@DearMYRTLE.com
http://www.dearmyrtle.com

(c) 2007 Pat Richley All Rights Reserved