Making a Mini-book, Part VI

This is the sixth post on my experiment comparing making a print-on-demand mini book with making a similar book by hand.
After my disappointment with the books I made on Lulu, I opened the box containing my iPhoto-made books nervously. Happily they were an order of magnitude better! You have to buy 3 iPhoto books at a time ($11.97 + shipping). Each book came wrapped in a resealable cellophane sleeve. There’s no Apple or iPhoto logo on the back (although the back cover and inside cover pages are all white — doesn’t seem to be a way to put your artwork on those pages, unfortunately).
The big problem is that the book doesn’t really lie flat — the first half of the book has an approx. 1/4″ gutter, while the back half pretty much lies completely open. Since I didn’t take the gutter into account in my artwork, the immediate visual result is that the text, which should be centered on the page, isn’t quite. So if I’m going to print these again, I’d re-do my images to compensate. It also looks like the entire book should have the gutter, not just the front half. With only 3 books as a sample, I can’t tell whether this is a flaw in the production of only my books or all mini-books.