Thursday 3 November 2011

Bathtub Admiral review : Your Own Book - Printed & Bound


I was recently invited over to check out Bathtub Admiral, a company who produce and print your own personalised book. My initial thought was OK, I'm sure it'll be nice enough but it's not very original, there are dozens of other personalised photobook companies out there already. But when I went to look, it's actually much more innovative than I first thought.

You can fill your book up with photos if you want, but you can also add a lot of text. I decided to use my voucher to create a family cookbook, which I have filled up not only with family fave recipes but also lots of cute pictures of the kids baking and eating their meals. It's exactly the sort of book I would have loved to have when I moved out of home aged 18 to go to uni and wanted to replicate some of the home cooking I yearned for without having a clue where to start. As well as being a handy place to keep those recipes that I am constantly looking up (we've made our gorgeous Banana Bread literally dozens of times but I can still never remember how much of each ingredient we need !), I'm hoping it will be a lovely family keepsake book for the kids to look back on in years to come.

The website offers various page templates, as well as clipart, plus the possibility to upload photos, text and scanned images of - for example - handwritten recipes handed down through generations, kids' drawings, restaurant menus or holiday souvenirs, to make your book into a real treasure trove of personal memories. You can see the fabulous Antigua cookbook that they have as a model on their website.

We went for a much more modest book but it was still a lot of work. My advice is to upload everything you want to use, including photos and all the text you want to copy and paste, into a folder on your desktop so that you're ready to go before starting to create your book. Note that any photos saved as bitmap will need to be transformed into jpegs before you can upload them to the book creator - easy enough with a programme like Paint but it all takes time.

The actual book creation programme on the Bathtub Admiral website didn't run entirely smoothly. For the first couple of times, I couldn't get the dialogue box up to allow me to authorise the programme to download but, with a bit of patience and guidance from the lovely people at Bathtub Admiral, I got there in the end.

My one big criticism of the book creator is that the box for typing your text is tiny so rereading and checking for errors is near on impossible. Hence my advice to get your text ready in a Word/Open Office document ready to copy and paste before you start. I did notice that a few commas, slashes and colons disappeared when I copied the text over though so I would have preferred to proofread it all. (EDIT : Some helpful advice from Bathtub Admiral - "We always suggest that new users consult the "how to" clips if they have any problems and the one that would have helped you with the text can be found here http://www.youtube.com/user/BathtubAdmiral?feature=mhee#p/a/u/1/iXI0emdRtiE . This shows that the text you are typing is actually in the lower part of the bottom toolbar as well as the actual text box. This text working area is expandable, will spell check your entered text for you and allows you to format your text in numerous ways, size, colour, font, justification, etc." Aha, should have read that first then !)


I found the zoom tool to be clumsy too, so in the end, I gave up and crossed my fingers without a proper proofread. If there are any errors, it won't be the end of the world as it's a fun, family memory book, but if I'd wanted something really impressive or professional-looking, it would have been more of an issue.

We chose the cookbook but there are a selection of pre-formatted books to choose from, including baby books in pink or blue and "sorry you're leaving" books, which is a nice idea. I could also see these working really well as a wedding guest book or a family history book to hand down through the generations. They will print as many copies as you like so it would also be a fabulous school trip memory book, possibly that could be sold as a school fundraiser.

There are a whole host of formats to choose from, both in size and finish (Bound Image Wrapped, Spiral Image Wrapped and Leatherette with or without an image). You can create a book containing anywhere between 24 and 96 pages.

As long as you arm yourself with lots of patience and a couple of free evenings without the kids to put it all together, you can come up with a really lovely memory book that will be a treasured keepsake for the whole family, as well as future generations !

star rating : 4/5

RRP : from £18.75


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