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April 29, 2005
[ THE ULTIMATE PHOTO ALBUM ]
Create your own coffee table book
WITH EVERY NEW TECHNOLOGY comes a new business opportunity, and Geoff Hunt, onetime content manager for Ozemail broadband, has grasped the opportunity presented by digital photography.
With digital camera in hand the country is now awash with wannabe Max Dupains with hard drives full of pictorial masterpieces just begging to be turned into a lavish coffee table book. But where to find a publisher?
Enter Momento, the company that turns you into the layout artist and takes over the printing for you. If you want a one-off book in either A4 or A5, of any number of pages from 10 to 50 then Geoff’s your man.
The key to Momento is its free software. The digital images are loaded into the Momento application and then dragged onto the page where they are laid out using a look-and-click layout tool, which the company calls the ACE -- Aesthetic Composition Engine -- that spaces the images evenly on the page. A text tool is used to create body text or captions. The cover design and dust jacket are also handled by the intuitive software.
When the pages are laid out and the cover created the book is output as a PDF for instant proofing. If it looks good the Master Book File is created to send to Momento on CD. It is remarkably simple and free of drama and is a piece of software entirely developed in Australia. It is a Windows application, which means that Mac users must have Virtual PC installed in order to use it.
Once the layout is complete the book is saved to disc and sent to Momento in Sydney. The book is prepared for printing and sent out to be turned into pages on heavy satin finish paper. The cover dust jacket is laminated for protection from fingers, stains and UV light.
The price is approximately $80 plus 80 cents a printed page for A5 -- and in that size two copies must be ordered. In A4 the price is $105 plus $1 a page. A 45 page book costs $150. It takes 21 days from the receipt of the book file to delivery of the finished product. And there are discounts for quantities.
The quality of the product is superb, always assuming that the pictures are good. Geoff Hunt says that the company doesn’t presume to judge the quality of the images, so poor quality images will result in poor quality printed pages.
It’s not hard to see plenty of uses for the Momento service. Tim Clayton, a sports photographer with the Sydney Morning Herald, says: "The Momento service and software is a fantastic innovation for the professional photographer. We can now present our portfolios, photo essays and bodies of work in quality book form and it opens up the possibility of producing small print runs of books which would be otherwise impossible through normal publishing houses. The fact that you also have total control over the design and layout of your own book makes this simply brilliant.”
For the less ambitious there is always the creation of the permanent record of the special occasion to justify the cost of a Momento book. The family photo collection can be scanned into digital form and turned into a book for Grandpa’s 90th birthday. It beats handing the shoe box of snaps around at the party.
The printing is by a digital offset process and the images are guaranteed to last for 50 years under normal conditions. The paper, which comes from Norway, is made from plantation timber and by a chlorine free process.
The Momento service is illustrated on the company web site. There is a sample Mother’s Day book that opens and turns pages with a mouse click. A new version of the software will be released in two months time with inbuilt auto-correction for images that are not well exposed or accurately coloured.
Posted by terry at April 29, 2005 04:23 PM
Comments
The only reason why this service exists is http://www.mypublisher.com/default.php isn't shipping to Australia. The pricing for Momento is sooooooo expensive - how can it be justified when compare with mypublisher?
Posted by: Syd at May 2, 2005 05:43 PM
There are other options available in Australia, like My Reflections, that are much cheaper. http://www.myreflections.com.au
Posted by: Tash at May 9, 2008 02:48 PM