Lightroom 4 features a new "Book" module with seamless Blurb.com integration. YOu can read all about it here: de.blurb.com/lightroom .. I wondered how well it worked and gave it a try. WHat I am not going to do is take you through the LR module as it is fully self-explanatory. Just a brief couple of things i learned down the way:
1. Good Ergonomics in Lightroom: It is very easy to compile your book. No need to resize, sharpen, change color space-this is all done by the uploading routine. Just choose a layout, drag and drop your pictures and on to the next page. Lightroom resizes, autosharpens and color-space-changes your images automatically.
2. Pro essentials are lacking in Lightroom: Lightroom has a soft-proofing-feature in its newest iteration but this is useless for blurb because blurb uses a CMYK profle while Lightroom only supports RGB profiles. Consequently you need to take each photo to Adobe Photoshop to see how your image looks within blurb's Gamut (HP Indigo Printer - except for the cover).
Also you have no influence on sharpening of each image, which would be very helpful particularly if you compile books from images made by different cameras.
3. Quality of Blurb: Looks OK but nothing like a real photo. It lacks both luminance and rez. Dark areas look flat and posterized. You can see the printing raster in the pictures. It is OK but consumerish rather than fine-artish.
4. Workflow (for the Lightroom beta): Import your selection as unsharpened ProPhoto RGB 16bit tiffs to Lightroom. Leave them unsharpened. Compile and layout your book. Softproof each used image in Photoshop with the Blurb profile, amend where necessary. Upload to blurb as prophoto rgb without any sharpening applied. The Nikon D700 images turn out a little bit softer than the Sigma DP1 images in my book, therefore you may want to add a litle bit of Input sharpening to files from cameras equipped with AA-filtered sensors to offset this. Anything more however will compromise the quality of the book because resizing the file to Blurb's 300dpi only takes place after that. I'd quite like an optional workflow step allowing for custom sharpening after resizing.