Panraven is an online photo book creation application that lets anyone create very attractive online scrap books, which can also be turned into hard copy printed books. The two-year old Cambridge, Massachusetts-based company began by initially offering its services to travel tour operators, but this month Panraven launched its new online photo book creation app and printing services to the general public following a three month closed beta.
Panraven is a web application that is aimed at novice users. It really takes the guesswork out of page layout by providing a large library of pre-made styles and page layouts that are guaranteed to look good.
The first step to a Panraven "story" is picking a style. The app gives you the option of choosing a premade design from a number of categories (like "Wedding" and "Baby" and "Travel") or to create your own freeform book. The freeform option is the one I generally have the most fun with. Even with freeform books, however, you still need to choose from among a list of preset styles.
Once you have a style selected, you begin your project by uploading your media. Using the browser uploader is a snap, but Panraven also offers a downloadable photo uploading application called PicUp, as well as a Picasa plugin. The next step is to add your media to your story bucket -- which is where the photos that will be available for your story are stored. Panraven supports some simple social networking, and your friend's shared media is also available to you. Publicly shared media from other users is available as well, including entire pages from some Panraven books.
With media uploaded, it's on to editing your book. The editor is simple, and basically consists of dragging photos into predefined areas on the page and entering text. Panraven can even auto fill your pages with your photos if you don't really care about the order. The Panraven editor will automatically size your photos to fit the page, and will warn you if a photo is not a high enough resolution to print well.
Each predefined style comes with a large number of page layout options (think ~30 layouts), and swapping them around is easy. Each Panraven freeform book starts with 9 pages, but you can change which layout goes with which page and add or remove pages at will.
When you're done with your Panraven story, you can publish it publicly to a web viewer on the site, keep it to yourself, or share it with family or friends. You can also have Panraven print books over over 20 pages, but it's not cheap The pricing starts at $29.95 for a 20 page book and $.99 per page after that. Panraven has plans to offer an embeddable widget for stories, but so far doesn't appear to have it launched. Check out a sample Panraven story.
Listed below are links to blogs that reference this entry: Create Photo Books with Panraven.
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Has anyone actually ordered a photobook through this company? Any comments on the quality?
Posted by: Kira | July 30, 2007 3:22 PMI'd be interested in hearing as well. I love the books i have had made by Apple. I wonder how these compare. Also doesn't Lulu do this?
Seems like an interesting approach to monetizing photo content and getting the users to use the panraven services.
Posted by: john griffin | July 31, 2007 10:35 AMKira/John-
I am a marketing manager at Panraven. I think you will find the quality of our books to be very competitive with other providers in this space. The print quality is excellent, as is the consistency of the pages. They are hard bound (with an option for a leather upgrade).
You will find that we set ourselves apart in the design/layout options as you are creating stories on our site. Josh alluded to this a bit in his post.
Of course, we are always looking for ways to improve our existing product and provide our users with more options. What do you enjoy about the Apple books? What would you like to see that they do not provide?
Thanks for your interest.
Hope to see you on the site soon!
Andy Katz
Posted by: andy katz | July 31, 2007 11:24 AMMarketing Manager @ Panraven
Looks interesting, but I just looked at a couple of the examples on the first page and they are not very impressive. Might want to up the ante a bit on those.
Posted by: Mike | July 31, 2007 9:30 PMI wanted to add my 2 cents. I created a book on panraven and it just came today. The book looks amazing! The quality of the prints is great (I even had some low res photos in there that still came out good)! I actually gave it as a gift and it was really well received. The site was really easy to use (even for a novice) and I like the various layout options for the pages. It makes the book much more interesting to look at because you don't have the same set up on every page like you would with a traditional album. The paper quality was awesome too. I blew some of the photos up to full page size, and they look perfect. Give it a shot if you haven't already. Also, the first book is free if you share it with the community (I think this promo is still valid).
Posted by: Sue | August 1, 2007 10:17 AMHow does this compare to Blurb?
Posted by: Adam | August 1, 2007 11:32 AMThough you can produce similar books using both Panraven and Blurb, there are some fundamental differences between the two sites. Blurb is a desktop publishing application, requiring you to download software onto your computer to use their service. Panraven is Internet-based. You have the flexibility to login to your account on any computer and pick up where you left off with your story.
On Panraven, you also have access to a public library of over 30,000 photos from around the world to supplement your own personal photos.
In creating your stories, Panraven enables you to share media with your friends and collaborate in the creation of a story. Here is an example of a story that our company created:
http://www.panraven.com/visitor/VisitorViewStory.epage?sp=S101217
Each one of us contributed 2 pages. It was fun to put together and it really captures an occasion from a variety of perspectives.
Hope this helps.
Andy
Posted by: andy katz | August 1, 2007 12:45 PMquick response to Sue's comment...our free book promotion actually ended yesterday. BUT...we are running an exciting new contest dubbed MY SUMMER STORY contest. the grand prize is your choice of an iPhone or a 40 inch HDTV. here's a link to the details: http://www.panraven.com/contest/SummerStory.html
Posted by: Andy | August 1, 2007 12:54 PMIt does!
Thanks. This was new to me, I heard about Blurb but, being more a text guy, never used it. I'll keep an eye on Panraven and see what I can come up with,
Cheers
Adam
Posted by: Adam | August 1, 2007 1:07 PM