A review of Milkbooks: MOLESKINE+MILK
January 19, 2015
You might have heard of MOLESKINE+MILK. I didn’t until I ran across a deal on MyPoints, and maybe that should have been a red flag, but I let the MOLESKINE name and the initial look of the site lure me into buying a voucher.
Likes
The book binding was awesome.
The paper quality was lovely: thick, high quality glossy paper.
The book was delivered a little bit faster than I expected since they didn’t communicate a real expected delivery date (so I guess this is also a dislike because if I were ordering a gift, I’d need to know when it was going to arrive).
Dislikes
You can work in the expanded page view which takes up your whole screen or your regular browser. Both choices turn out to be frustrating. I always prefer working in my regular browser, but it turns out that you can’t scroll to the relevant stuff at the bottom of the screen to make selections of the style or color sets at the beginning of the book. There’s also no easy way to change your viewing selection when you figure this out so then you’ve got to get back to the homepage and start over. Frustratingly you may also find, as I did, that the full expanded page view STILL doesn’t show you all the options at the bottom of the page but you’re SOL as you STILL can’t scroll. Good luck figuring out how to select your color palette.
Image upload. It takes forever to upload high-resolution files, and you can’t reorganize or filter them in any really sensible or useful way. How they get uploaded is the order in which they appear.
Creating pages and layouts. You can’t shift a created Page 2 to Page 12 if you decide it fits better there. If you add a page, you have to add a full 4 page spread after the spread you’re working on. If you decide to delete a page, the whole spread has to go. It would be MUCH better if you could add 2 pages at a time or delete one at a time and sort out the total number of pages at the end when you’re Previewing to order the book.
Using the images. The used photos are marked with a check in the Edit pop-up box but you’re limited to the 9 images per screen view – they don’t have a handy way to scroll through the images along the bottom of the page so that you can grab all photos of a particular theme while you’re working on a particular spread. You can also only add photos one picture at a time to a spread, so if your layout requires 4 pictures, you have to click on Edit Image for every picture. Shutterfly, again, and other companies do this MUCH better.
You can’t delete a photo from the page without deleting it from the entire uploaded content menu. Instead you have to go into Edit and select a replacement photo right then and there, so you can’t just decide to remove the misplaced photo and come back to the spread later.
The spread options are extremely limited with only a few layout options per grouping of 1, 2, 3, 4, etc photos per page.
You can’t customize the image sizes in those layouts. You can only pick the image and increase the size from 100% to 200%.
You can’t decrease the size to better fit a layout, you can’t crop, brighten or edit the photos at all in the interface. If you didn’t know this and had uploaded all your photos in bulk, then your pictures aren’t going to be of uniform brightness or hue, you have to have edited them all beforehand. And you don’t have any real guide as to how to edit the sizes other than knowing they can only be square, landscape or portrait but if you load a larger landscape image into a square box, you can just shift it up, down, left, or right but you can’t make it smaller so the whole of the image fits.
There’s no option to fade images and create backgrounds, of course, so the really cool thing that PiC did with fading a full landscape photo with images on top for our other photo book? No can do.
Inviting contributors. They should really let you set the type of permissions a contributor can have or at least have more than one level of permissions where someone can basically be a co-owner and make independent decisions vs someone who can make decisions that have to be approved. It was immensely frustrating to PiC to be given contributor access but have to have all his edits require approval.
Overall
It’s a neat idea but on the whole, my experience with it was incredibly frustrating. I’m glad that we have our memory book but getting to that point was so time consuming, I couldn’t do it again.
It’s a shame, the books are beautiful and the interface looks like it’s going to be modern and easy to use but honestly working in Shutterfly or one of those more common book creation sites will be both much cheaper and much less aggravating.
My book specs: (1) Large 60-page Landscape book
Paid: $50 for the book, $9.99 for shipping to the US.
Full Price Value: $125
There are usually sales and coupons but that may just be during the earlier growth period. I can’t say that I could stand the level of frustration that it takes to complete a full book even for 30-40% off.
Apple, anyone? I believe the Mac has a function that allows you to create photo-based publications; for a fee, you send your PDF to Apple and they produce the print document.
I’ve played with it for a couple of things I wanted to make for my business, but then, being a cheapskate, didn’t much feel like paying Apple for the privilege of seeing them printed. Tried to find a way to download to a PDF that I could get a local printer to do, but that was highly problematic. Obviously they don’t want you to do that, so they set up all sorts of roadblocks.
$125 seems like a lot for one copy. You’d do better with a PoD publisher…check out Snowfall Publishing in AZ.
I wouldn’t be paying $125 for a book, but I’m also not paying $2k for a Mac either 🙂
I used one of these to make our wedding guest book (free through work). It was my first time doing something like this though so can’t really comment on the experience as I have no other base point. I do remember a few frustrations, which I think you covered off here.
Well it’s fantastic that was free through work! The quality of the finished product is awfully nice but the interface .. oh the interface!
This company is terrible. Does not honor promotional offers and has nearly non-existent customer service. Very unreliable. I would not waste your time unless you have a lot of it and it isn’t valuable to you.
My wife and I decided ton Milk as our wedding album supplier since they had offered us a coupon. The coupon is only redeemable at checkout and lasts 21 days. So, we spent many hours making up our album in order to have it ready for ordering before the expiration date.
Well, the promotional code will not work. Customer service is barely responsive and not helpful. And now we have invested 15-20 hours in creating the album but it will cost us much more than we had expected.
So yeah. We are not ordering the album we spent all that time creating and will now cost us twice what was advertised. And now, we will not have the album in time for when we will are traveling to see our families.
Milk, and more specifically, Milks’ lack of customer service and honorable business practices, have cost us the wedding album experience that we wanted.
I wish I just selected a more reputable company and ordered for a slightly higher price.
I’m so sorry your experience was even worse than mine 🙁
I had better luck with customer service than Scott, but still didn’t get what I had originally ordered. I bought 3 books for $80 a while ago (2013, oops!), and my email receipt says nothing of a timeline within which to use the voucher (now it is relatively visible, I see). They reactivated my account for the dollar amount I spent, but not for the deal I purchased. Which I suppose is the best one could honestly expect for something purchased 3 years ago.
They set me up with their new software, which is hopefully better than what you have all experienced–I have until the end of the year to find out.
Oh wow, that’s a good long time ago! I hope that your experience with the software is better, don’t forget to use that $80 🙂