Yesterday and again today I tried uploading a book to Blurb. Each time the progress bar never moved, and I was forced to cancel.

So what was wrong? There seemed nothing odd about the images, and I could generate the book as a PDF. The book + cover wasn’t huge, 12×12 inches and 50 pages amounting to roughly 180mb as a PDF, but in any case I am on a fast internet connection (200/20 mbs) and Lightroom was certainly communicating with Blurb as it was able to get the price info from them. It wasn’t clear where the problem lay.

As I know the Lightroom SDK, I eventually decided to edit the preferences file and zap the relevant preferences (mentioned here):

• Blurb_Currency
• LayoutModule_blurbUsername
• pw_pw_com.adobe.lightroom.layout.blurb_blurb_accounts_generic_username

Restarting Lightroom, I tried to upload the book and this time I was asked to enter my Blurb user details and password (which have never changed). The upload then proceeded normally and sent Blurb the book.

Clearly it is unacceptable to leave the user wondering why upload isn’t happening. Equally, assuming the fault is in Lr, I can’t see Adobe putting much time into Book. So if you do apply the above method, make sure you take care – by backing up that preference file before you hack away!