This cheery piece of news flopped into my inbox this morning. C’mon Blurb, don’t you know there’s a recession happening?!?

To Our Friends in the UK and Europe:

As many of you may know, in the last year Blurb has made a significant investment in our UK and European business operations. We now employ a small team in our London office, house one of our customer support folks in Amsterdam, and we also print and fulfill our UK and European orders from a print operation on the continent. The good news is that we are definitely full-fledged, tax-paying employers in the UK and Europe (support the local economies!), but of course the bad
news is that we are therefore subject to the cost structures and currency fluctuations of the same economies.

And the economic news has not been so pretty in the past few months (as you well know). So, fellow Blurberati, we find ourselves in a spot where we must increase our prices so as to stay abreast of increasing costs. We have always had the goal of being fantastic value for money, and we are confident that that will still be the case – even with the new increases. Many prices will move very modestly, and some a bit more so.

All the new prices will be effective 27 August, so that should give you a couple of weeks to place an order prior to the new increases should you have interest to do so. For those of you who utilize our Set Your Price feature, you will want to update your book detail pages to reflect the new pricing on or before 27 August when the new pricing goes into effect.Finally, I wanted to take a moment to thank each of you for being a Blurb customer. We started this company with a vision to enable everyone in the world who had something to say, whether in pictures or words, to produce affordable books
of uncommon beauty. The fact that you are already doing so, in such great numbers, is both astonishing and gratifying.

Many thanks and all best,

But wait, what about the ‘magic calculator’? Blurb seem to have gotten some retail advice from the slew of other retailers and suppliers using sterling as a tool to beat the rest of us with euros in our pockets. As an example from their revised price sheet, take the following;

10 x 8 softcover book with 20-40 pages. £10.95 if the queens head is on your cash. If you’re not so lucky, it’ll be €16.95. Sorry Blurb, but £10.95 is not €16.95. Using frequently updated exchange rates from xe.com, £10.95 is actually €12.72. Where did that extra €4 come from?

At the other end of the scale, a 12 x 12 hardcover imagewrap book with up to 440 pages is £105.95. But no, it’s actually €156.95. Or if you’re using the actual exchange rates, just a cent or two over €123. Nearly €34 extra in Blurbs back pocket, all thanks to the magic calculator.

The full list of new prices is here; Blurb’s new pricing

So really, when I ordered my first test book from Blurb and thought it was expensive, I should have been counting my blessings. Thankfully, there are a few other print on demand companies I can try out. I just fancied having a bitch about it, thats all.