There are plenty of photo book manufacturers out there, but My Social Book has managed to find a way to stand out from its competition. In a world where Instagram accounts and Facebook albums have replaced traditional printed photos, My Social Book enables its users to pluck their favorite memories from their social media channels and curate them into a personalized photo book.
We put the My Social Book photo book to the test to see whether it compares to the best photo books. You can source your images from a personal Facebook account, a Facebook page or Instagram, but we used an Instagram account for our test.
Specifications
Book shape: Portrait
Book size: 20 x 25cm
Paper: Standard Paper (90gsm), Semi-Gloss Soft Paper 135gsm
Style: Softcover with glossy finish, Hardcover with glossy finish, Thick Hardcover with soft matte finish and ribbon bookmark
Shipping: Worldwide (prices may vary)
Ease of use
The My Social Book photo book creator is unique among other photo book manufacturers, but it's still pretty easy to use. Other photo book creators will require you to upload your images onto their website and then go on to design the photo book. However, My Social Book requires you to select which social media account you want to include and then choose which time frame you want to feature.
Usefully, you can delete any posts that aren't quite up to snuff and you can also edit the title and sub-title on the front cover (although you can't seem to get rid of the large My Social Book logo). However, there are a few aspects that aren't quite user-friendly. Whereas with most other photo book software you can decide how many extra pages you want to add, the My Social Book software only allows you to do this by expanding the time frame you want to cover on your chosen social media channel.
Our other issue with the photo book creator is that it was a little slow. We found it particularly sluggish at loading pictures when we were trying to edit the photo book, but it was generally just quite slow for anything that we wanted to do. However, considering that My Social Book is pulling content from a third party site (i.e. Facebook or Instagram), we're not particularly surprised that it's slower than other sites (where you upload your photos directly onto the website).
Another small frustration was that we couldn't seem to find a way to remove the original captions accompanying the posted photos from our photo books. While we understand that the idea of My Social Book is that it recreates the user's social media account in a book, it would be nice if users had the ability to choose whether to include captions or not.
Quality of results
The confirmation email predicted that shipping would take 7-15 days, but it took 19 days for the photo book to arrive. It's not immediately clear what the reason for this delay was, but we also never received a shipping notification (even though the order notification advises that we should expect to receive one).
However, when the My Social Book photo book did eventually arrive, we found that the photo book was very well protected. It was covered in a plastic film wallet that kept it safe from any scrapes within its sturdy cardboard packaging.
There were no scuffs or marks on the front cover, nor were there any dogeared pages. In fact, the state of the book when it arrived was actually better than most of the other photo books we've reviewed. We were also very impressed with how true-to-color the printing was on both the front cover and the pages within. We would again say that it was more true-to-color than most of the other photo books (but there is an important caveat that we weren't able to test using the same images as the other photo books, due to the nature of the service).
The My Social Book logo on the front cover was a little distracting – other photo book manufacturers tend to place their logos somewhere a little less conspicuous, such as the spine or back cover. We did find some of the image placements within the book a little odd as well, as you would occasionally get a page with just one small image on it, leaving a lot of blank space.
Conclusion
All in all, we would say that My Social Book is a great concept, but has an execution that could do with a few minor tweaks in order to take it to the next level. The lack of shipping notification and long wait time for the photo book to arrive was probably our biggest frustration with the service. However, we would also like to see the ability to both delete captions from photos and edit the automatic arrangement of the photos in the book as well.
On the positive side, the quality of the soft cover book was genuinely impressive and the color reproduction seemed to be far more accurate than most of the other photo books we've reviewed. We could see this being a fantastic product for anyone looking to compile some of their favorite social media memories into one high quality book.
Read more:
• Best photo books in 2020
• Best photo printing online: top services from around the web
• Best canvas print services in 2020
• Best photo albums in 2020
