Coffee Table Books

Crafting your own customized coffee table books are a breeze and much easier than you think. The biggest commitment you will find yourself making is the time spent choosing the photos from your picture galleries to make the final cut.

‘There is a huge trend towards customized coffee table books,’ says a leading publisher. ‘Everyone can now create their own works of art thanks to the ease of digital photography. It’s so easy when you have the raw materials you need – just the photos.’

Taking it leather-bound is just the next step. ‘You don’t need to be a designer or have design qualifications,’ says a photo book enthusiast who recently had her transformed digital photos in leather photo albums. ‘You just need to know and trust the right people to do it for you. The fun comes from creating what’s inside the coffee table books – and that’s entirely up to you,’ she says.

The tradition of leather photo albums stems from yesteryear when books were bound and placed in family libraries, ultimately to become heirlooms. Yet you can create a modern, visually stunning book while having it encased in classic leather binding.

The ease of this is due to the rise in digital photography and the prevalence of computers in the home and the office. While photographs can be sent with ease on email, they are disposable entirely in soft copy – and no one keeps emails forever.

Instead of housing them on your computer, why don’t you enjoy photographs celebrating those special moments – your wedding or birthday, to photos of your children – as they should be? You can have these moments personally on display and in and around your home when they are bound into Xbook coffee table books.

‘We had thousands of photos sitting on our computer that we never looked at,’ admits Melissa, a Sydney mum. ‘We decided to pull together our favourite moments of our children’s birthdays in the last year and put them together in a coffee table book for each of our sets of parents,’ she says. ‘The result was a beautiful photo book of memories housed in a gorgeous leather photo album that our parents can keep on display at home.’

‘We also decided to have some extras made in different sizes for our friends.’

Compiling photographs into a coffee table book is also a great way to preserve older photographs that you may have converted into digital files. Protecting memories is one of the most important things you can do. Everyone knows how hard copy photos taken only ten years ago and placed in an old-fashioned photo album can lose their colour and quality. If you have painstakingly saved these images into digital format, you could also consider creating coffee table books of them for the family to have on hand. That way, the memories can never be lost.

‘You need to rescue your old photos now,’ says a leading photo archivist. ‘As we speak, your older photos are decaying, fading and being eroded by adhesive glue and plastic coating that attacks both the surface and backing of your treasure older photos,’ she says.

‘At the time, we all thought we were safely preserving our photos for future generations, but now we know better. Sometimes we can hardly remove them from our older photo albums,’ she says. ‘The best insurance in saving these photos is having them saved in a digital format and then bound into coffee table books for future generations to enjoy.’

Design options can be entirely up to you but there is also assistance available from Xbook’s online support system or staff members if you need help or a nudge in the right direction. After all, producing a book of keepsake memories shouldn’t be a daunting process. It should be an enjoyable one.

Leather photo albums not only protect the coffee table book inside but are attractive when it comes to home decorating.

‘Many of my clients love the look of classic objects and ask me to seek out leather-bound objects for their bookshelves and coffee tables,’ says a Sydney interior designer. ‘The trend is towards combining the classic elements of the past with the sleek new lines of the future,’ she says.

If you want a beautiful coffee table book that is made to your specifications, look to Xbook. Not only can they compile a photo book that is entirely unique, but they can also produce a beautiful leather photo album edition for your needs.