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| John and Brin 3.12.10 |
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John Bryan and Brin Michelle For Time and Eternity |
While looking, for me, for a good site to use for Rachel's wedding signing book I'm making for her, John came across this other site that doesn't do full-out photobooks. It's called HotPrints, and they claim their goal is to provide FREE products to all of their customers. Right now they're at the point of giving every customer four free photobooks a month. No catches! Well, kind of. You do have to pay shipping, their books are only 16 sheets -- including covers -- so it's really more of a booklet, your back cover is doubled as the printing label, and they stick some advertisements in the middle. However, shipping is only $2.99 worldwide (at least for the US and Mexico...I haven't tried anywhere else), and their advertisements are easily removable. Also, you can choose to pay $3.99 for the book and have no advertisements and a separate shipping bag (so your book itself is without a shipping label). I don't know what else paying for the book adds, if anything. I have yet to personally see a copy to know about quality since we're still in Mexico, but we had my MIL check out the one we sent home and she was very impressed. Shipping time was great for home. Even though I'm pretty sure they're based in the UK, it only took 2 or 3 days (Carol wasn't sure which day it arrived) for it to get to Utah. However, here in Mexico it's been about 3 weeks and I still have seen no sign of the one we sent here -- but that could be a separate problem, who knows? We'll call them by the end of the week to be sure everything went well on their end. Two last things: they give you a free digital pdf copy that's easy to download, which I think is pretty swell and should be a necessity for any photobook site. However, their interface for creating the book needs a lot of improvement. Some people really like their auto-fill option, but I like having complete control over what my product looks like. If you like having the site make your book for you and you just make a couple adjustments here and there, then they're great. But for me, I need more options.
Sorry to blab on about some random site. I in no way was compensated for it, I'm just way excited about it. I'll totally pay $3 each to have a plethora of cute little photobooks, especially since they're perfect for gifts!
Update:
ReplyDeleteWe never got the one we sent to us in Mexico...but we've had other big issues with Mexican post, so don't let that deter you.
I still haven't been around when things have arrived in the US, I've always been out of town, so I can't personally vouch for shipping times, but I can still say it's not forever long.
Print quality is excellent, especially for what you pay. Even paper quality is nice, though thin. They do stick in the packaging a nice piece of cardboard for support, which is a plus. The advertisement bit is really easy to remove. It's right in the middle, one two-page sheet (so four page sides), and the booklet is stapled so you can just pull it out without trouble. The advertisements themselves aren't annoying in design.
We also bought two books as a present for Rachel and Stephen's parents, smaller copies of their book. Not too bad. Though it doesn't have the shipping label stamped on, the back cover still has a hotprints label on the bottom, so probably rarely worth paying the extra $3.99 for.
Overall, I'm still very satisfied, and will continue using these for anything I can get away with :)