Publisher Summary - RocketLife
I recently received an invitation from RocketLife's PR department to create two complimentary photo books. I used RocketLife's book builder software to layout and print both books: the first, a leather-bound, 12.5x10 landscape book with die-cut front; the second, a premium quality, 8.5x11 black leather-bound book with dust cover.
Both books were delivered promptly (even with the holiday rush) in quality packaging. Book quality was great, although I was not as impressed with the premium photo book as I had hoped. Perhaps this is a result of the regular-quality book (which I received first) being quite decent - what makes the premium quality book better are details that don't immediately jump out at you. The premium book has a better binding system (although the regular book's is also quite good) and higher quality paper. That said, the printed images in the regular book were quite satisfactory - the premium book offers richer blacks, but also introduced some color shift on certain images that was not present in the regular book. The two books were printed in different locations; it may be that the difference in images was a result of being printed on two different presses. Either way, the images were for the most part true to the images post-processed on my color-calibrated monitor. I enjoyed using the Rocketlife book creation software. It is easy to use, very powerful, and intuitive. I liked that it was easy to switch between several different themed templates and photo layouts from page to page. The software also has a very cool feature that makes it easy to use an image as a background 'watermark' for the primary photo elements on the page. I can see the creative user generating a very compelling book with this software. That said, there were also a few things I didn't like about the software. First, the sofware (which uses a hybrid model - running locally but requiring web access to function) runs only under Internet Explorer. I am primarily a Firefox user, so this is a minor annoyance. More critical was the fact that the software does not allow absolute positioning of captions or other page elements. While this is generally not a problem, I found it frustrating that I was not able to size and position my captions consistently from page to page. I had to 'eyeball' it, hoping that the size and location of my captions was not going to be overly distracting in the finished product. Rocketlife has a compelling product - their book creation software is very solid, and the printed books the software creates are high-quality and true to what you've designed. I think you will be quite satisified with your RocketLife book.