Neil Rimer, co-founder of Index Ventures, said Betfair will be one of the firm’s best investments in terms of return multiple. Betfair’s shares traded up 19 percent from its initial public offering price, closing Friday at GBP15.50 on the London Stock Exchange. The firm sold 493,000 shares in the offering for GBP6.4 million, and still owns 2.3 million shares worth GBP35.7 million at the current price.

Betfair’s major shareholders also include SoftBank Corp. and European venture firm Balderton Capital, which sold part of its stake to Softbank for about $554 million in 2006.

Betfair pioneered online person-to-person sports betting by developing the Betting Exchange, a market place that allows consumers to bet at odds sought by themselves or offered by other customers and thereby eliminating the need for a traditional bookmaker. It now has about 3 million registered users betting on sports events and playing online poker and other games.

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One of the most satisfying ways to share digital photos is to do so using an increasingly popular and delightfully analog item: the photo book. These books contain a collection of your digital photos, professionally printed on heavy paper and handsomely bound with hard or soft covers. They are fairly priced and can be made and ordered with little effort or skill.

MyPublisher Inc. (www.mypublisher.com), the company that started this business over five years ago, continues as a main player in the field. It now offers its books in various sizes and prices, and recently released a new version of its book-assembling software program, BookMaker 2.0.

Apple Computer, iPhoto Price: $29.99 for 8.5″x11″.

But other companies know well the emotional draw of these books — and so sell their own photo books that play to their strengths. Apple Computer Inc. uses iPhoto, the stellar photo-organizing program that comes on its computers, as a starting point for making books, incorporating handy editing within the company’s famously simple user interface.

Eastman Kodak Co.’s Kodak EasyShare Gallery (www.kodakgallery.com), one of the most popular Web sites for sharing digital photos, encourages users to make a book using photos that may already be uploaded for sharing. Its book-assembling software is a Web-based interactive program.

Each company offers a hardcover photo book that measures roughly the same size and costs $30 for 20 printed pages. The only way to know how each book will look is to assemble and order one from each company. So this week, we did the job for you, taking time to make and order books from MyPublisher, Apple and Kodak EasyShare Gallery.

All three contenders use book-making software that allows you to choose various themes and layouts. With each, you can either start from scratch, manually placing every photo, or you can start with an auto-fill feature that initially places your photos throughout the book, but allows you to rearrange, resize or delete them, or add others.

MyPublisher Inc. Price: $29.80 for 8.75″x11.25″; $59.80 for 11.5″x15″.

In our test, MyPublisher, which runs on Mac and Windows operating systems, reigned supreme, though Apple wasn’t far behind. MyPublisher offers three book sizes, three cover materials, two ways to display a cover photo, an intuitive assembling software program and elegant layouts. Though Apple’s iPhoto books were a pleasure to make and produced some of the most artistically appealing books with 19 optional themes, iPhoto runs only on Macs, leaving out most computer users. And it doesn’t offer as much overall variety as MyPublisher.

Kodak’s books cost the same or more than those from MyPublisher and Apple, yet stood out as the most difficult to assemble and the least attractive. And because Kodak EasyShare Gallery’s book-making software lives online, it’s slower.

We used the same set of photos from Katie’s summer vacation to make each book in standard size — about 8.5″ by 11″ for MyPub and Apple and 9″ by 10″ for Kodak — and started with each company’s auto-fill feature.

We also created the newest extra-large books offered by Kodak and MyPublisher; respectively, they measure 12″ by 14″ and 11.5″ by 15″ and cost about $70 and $60 for 20 pages. Apple doesn’t offer larger books.

MyPublisher’s BookMaker 2.0 follows five steps: Get Photos, Organize, Make Book, Preview and Purchase. These numbered sections appear at the bottom of your screen with your current step highlighted; moving ahead or back is done by selecting another section. To get your photos into MyPublisher, you can drag and drop them into BookMaker 2.0 from anywhere on your computer.

We spent most of our time in MyPublisher’s third step: Make Book. Here, we edited images, moved them around to tweak the auto-fill feature and changed page layouts. A bar at the top of the screen offers a place for dragging and dropping unused photos or those you’d rather use later. After assembling a page filled with sailboat images, we saved one unused sailboat shot for later in the book and this area served as a reminder that it was there.

Kodak EasyShare Gallery Price: $29.99 for 9″x10.25″; $69.99 for 12″x14″.

Page layouts describe your options for arranging photos on each page. For example, one three-photo layout arranges a large image above two smaller shots. MyPublisher’s small flaw is that it doesn’t automatically coordinate page layouts with the number of photos you choose to show per page; you must select the number of photos per page and then choose the page layout in a separate step.

Depending on the type of book you choose, you can opt to add captions or not; we opted for layouts that emphasized photos rather than photos and captions, but added a few captions when possible. We typed out titles on the cover of each book, and added a few sentences of description on the title page. IPhoto offered automatic spell checking; the others didn’t.

In iPhoto, we looked through 19 book themes before settling on Watercolor — a design with calming pastel colors in the background of each page and colored stripes on the cover. IPhoto provided the best editing options, including red-eye remover, retouching and eight different photo-altering effects. Its full-screen option shows extremely large images of photos for detailed editing. As we assembled the book, we easily switched to editing mode by double-clicking on a photo.

IPhoto, like MyPublisher, has a section for holding unused photos at the top of its screen. This section could also display the entire book’s pages and layouts — helping us avoid repeating the same layouts page after page.

Kodak EasyShare Gallery struck out in too many areas. Its Web-based software took a few seconds to save our book every time we turned to another page. We couldn’t see our book’s pages or the photos themselves in a detailed view.

The most frustrating feature of Kodak EasyShare Gallery is its lame selection of page layouts. Even the semi-interesting layouts arrange all photos (except full-page images) up too high on the page. And the auto-fill feature in Kodak’s largest book had such limited layout choices that we would have given up, had we not been testing for this column.

The finished products for each book matched our experiences with their software: the standard and extra-large books from MyPublisher were attractive and well made. We especially like MyPublisher’s cover choices: either a matted image viewed through an opening in the hard cover, or a label with one of our photos. The iPhoto books looked stylishly unique and used the most attractive fonts on the cover and title page. But they didn’t offer the covers with an inset photo, which we found more attractive.

The standard and extra-large books that we made using Kodak EasyShare Gallery both arrived with cheap-looking bindings. The covers on these books both used inset photos, but with windows that were too small to see the book’s title, which makes no sense. And the layouts for photos were nowhere near as appealing as those made with the other companies.

If you want the best combination of variety and a software program that works on all computers, you’ll be pleased with MyPublisher. IPhoto’s books are just as attractive and even more stylish, but aren’t available for Windows users or those hoping to make a large book. This holiday season, consider choosing one of these two book-making programs to hold your family memories.

Email: MossbergSolution@wsj.com

Corrections & Amplifications

MyPublisher doesn’t plan to release a version of its BookMaker 2.0 software to run on Apple Computer Inc.’s Macintosh computers until next month. Macintosh owners today can use MyPublisher to print their photo books, but they must use a plug-in for Apple’s iPhoto program. This article erroneously implied that the MyPublisher software for making photo books runs on Macintosh computers now.

Soon after MyPublisher’s introduction, Apple Computer began offering these same books using its own software and interface. Apple built the book-design process right into its widely praised iPhoto picture-organizing software, which is included on all new Macs. Apple’s book-creation interface is different from MyPublisher’s, but MyPublisher produces the books under contract for Apple.

Shutterfly books offers another way to print and display your digital photos.

Now, two of the big online photo-printing services, Shutterfly and Eastman Kodak‘s EasyShare Gallery (formerly known as Ofoto) also have begun offering bound photo books, along with their usual assortment of cheesy photo gifts such as mugs and mouse pads. The two new entrants don’t use MyPublisher to produce their books, and because they are Web-based they don’t use software that resides on your personal computer to design the books as MyPublisher and Apple do. Everything is done on their Web sites.

The new, wider availability of hardcover books provides another in the increasing number of options designed to tempt digital-camera owners to turn their pictures into hard copy. Three of these services also offer cheaper, smaller softcover books, and MyPublisher says it believes its low-end books can one day compete with snapshots.

I have long been a fan of these bound photo books because I believe they provide an impressive way to save important memories. So, my assistant Katie Boehret and I set out to compare the books produced by these four companies.

We focused on three things: how easy and flexible the book-creation process was; how attractive and sturdy the finished books looked; and how much the books cost. We couldn’t judge a fourth factor, turnaround time, because our deadline required us to ask the companies to rush the books out more quickly than they usually do.

MyPublisher BookMaker

Using about 40 of the same digital photographs each time, we created photo books using MyPublisher BookMaker, Apple’s iPhoto, Shutterfly and Kodak EasyShare Gallery. Each book had the same photo on the cover, and we chose classic black leather for each cover, except for the Apple book, where we used black linen because leather isn’t offered.

Each company’s book costs about the same — $30 for a hardcover with up to 10 double-sided pages, and $40 with a leather cover. Additional pages cost a dollar in iPhoto and Shutterfly, $1.49 for MyPublisher BookMaker and $1.99 with Kodak Gallery.

Our tests produced a split verdict. We preferred both the creation process and the finished books from MyPublisher and Apple over the newer, Web-based entries from Shutterfly and Kodak. While we found Apple’s software for designing the books to be the best, we preferred the finished product received from MyPublisher to the book we got from Apple, even though they were both produced on MyPublisher’s equipment.

The book that we created using MyPublisher BookMaker was the most attractive overall. Its beautiful full-page photos that bleed to the edges of each page were stunning, and MyPublisher’s new peek-through cover (a framed rectangle in the cover’s center allows the title-page photo to be seen) was the most appealing cover of the four books.

Kodak EasyShare Gallery

Apple’s book was almost as nice and had the full-bleed pages. But Apple doesn’t offer the peek-through cover window or the leather cover.

Apple’s iPhoto did the best job of letting us design the books. It offers the best combination of automatic and manual adjustments, with options for adding personal style.

While Shutterfly’s software and book were better than Kodak Gallery, we still favored the ease of use and finished products from iPhoto and BookMaker, respectively, over the Web-based services. We also preferred the binding on the MyPublisher and Apple books, which seemed sturdier to us than the process used by Shutterfly and Kodak.

All four programs offer a similar way to view the photos that you will use in your book. After you retrieve them from a folder or other spot on your computer (in the case of MyPublisher BookMaker and iPhoto) or from an album of uploaded photos that you have created (on Shutterfly or Kodak Gallery), the photos reside in a horizontal tray above or below your main work space.

Each book-creation program offers a work space that displays mock pages representing those that will appear in your actual book. Each offers a variety of templates for laying out your book, with large, single photos on some pages and multiple photos on others, in varying layouts.

All of the programs we tested have a feature that can automatically fill your book with your photos for you. Sometimes this feature is useful, but we also like to have the option of manually building our book with certain photos on full pages, others paired with similar photos and less important pics left out completely if there isn’t enough room. So it bothered us that MyPublisher BookMaker didn’t offer an option for manually building our book. There is a cumbersome process for rearranging photos once the book is filled, but we prefer the manual building feature the others offer.

Apple Computer’s iPhoto Books

In BookMaker, you can select from five themes, which determine the style of your book, and four set templates, which define how many photos you will have on each page. A more detailed section in BookMaker offers over 64 layout combinations. We chose the “Various Mixed” theme and the “Mixed (1,3,4,2)” template.

The program offers some built-in photo editing, including an “auto adjust” button that brightens and sharpens your photo. But it lacked one of the best editing tools — red-eye remover. We had to remove red eye in another program first before using our photos in BookMaker.

Apple’s iPhoto offers 15 different themes and multiple layouts for each. It also has nine different editing tools, including a simple red-eye remover and a one-click enhance button. Everything here was simple and intuitive, and most functions occur on the same page — you are rarely opening other screens or sections.

But, iPhoto crashed twice while we were using it, and the first crash deleted our entire book, typed-out introduction page and all. We also didn’t like iPhoto’s finished front cover, which bears a photo glued to it. This cover started looking shabby in no time as its white background got dirty and one corner curled up.

Shutterfly and Kodak EasyShare Gallery were similar in style, though we preferred Shutterfly. Kodak offered 10 themes (we chose Charcoal Borders), some of which were more creative than Shutterfly’s nine themes (we chose Simple). But when we started dropping our photos into each book, we noticed that in Kodak Gallery the used photos still showed up in our tray, while the Shutterfly pics no longer did; we preferred Shutterfly’s system so we knew which photos were already used.

Shutterfly also offers better editing options, including a red-eye tool that magnifies each of your subject’s eyes before you click a button to remove the red part. But because Shutterfly’s individual image views are so much smaller than those on a program like iPhoto, the eyes in our photos were so small that we couldn’t even see whose were red. This is a serious problem for Shutterfly.

Kodak doesn’t even offer red-eye elimination in its book-building program. None of its layouts offer caption-free pages, so even when we didn’t add captions to a photo, a huge chunk of the page was empty, making it look like there was a lot of wasted space in the book. Every other book offered page layouts, if not entire book themes, that didn’t leave space for captions. Also Kodak’s books are physically smaller than the others.

Overall, if you are looking for the most attractive book, MyPublisher BookMaker won’t disappoint, and you might even get used to its slightly more complicated software. But if iPhoto ever offers peek-through covers and leather covers like those from BookMaker, we would have to change our vote and make Apple the overall winner.

With reporting by Katherine Boehret

Write to Walter S. Mossberg at mossberg@wsj.com