P: Ability to create custom book templates/sizes from scratch

I agree

Sadly, I have reverted to using Microsoft Mail merge for 90% of my needs, which allows me to put images, titles and captions, where I want, with fonts, character sizes and alignment professionally laid out.

After a shoot, I do a quick selection, add Titles, Captions and Location info in Lr and export to jpg. I use the Lr Listview plug-in to export this info to a text file. I have a Macro in Word which then with a single click creates my document. I then save this to PDF.

I can fine tune the Word document as required. I can have this completed in draft form and emailed to the client within an hour of finishing the shoot.

I use InDesign when I want to craft a book. I would produce a lot more books if I could choose where to place images and text within Lightroom, so if Adobe are getting a percentage of Blurb sales then they are just losing more and more business.

There are huge advantages to keeping this within Lightroom, which I would prefer to do, but Adobe obviously choose to allow us suffer with the current crippled module and only provide lip service to the concept of workflow.

I have the exact same issue, I already use Lightroom and I'm forced to export my photos to create books for my clients.

I just downloaded LR6 hoping to use the Book module for the photobooks for my clients. I am glad i just downloaded the trial version cause the options are so constrained and very few options with sizes. It is disappointing and i certainly wont be paying for the full version.

I gave up hope of Adobe making improvements to the book module and have taken the painstaking steps of building my book pages in Photoshop and incorporating them into Lightroom.

It is possible to modify templates and create new templates by modifying files with extension .lua that can be found in the Lightroom installation folders. As far as I know, this is not documented. It is not user friendly either because you have to type the coordinates and frame dimensions in a text file without the ability to do interactive changes. However, I successfully use this to create books with different sizes as required by suppliers other than Blurb.
I would be very easy for Adobe to implement custom templates. I don't understand what they are waiting for. The book module without custom templates is not very useful.

I agree with you. Until Adobe gives us variable Slideshows, Books, and Webs, I will go elsewhere.

I am building several large photobooks (200+ pages) from RAW images in Lightroom. I love direct integration of the book capability into LR because color corrections made in LR are directly applied to the photobook. I am also impressed with the stability of the module; my last book exported to a 1.2GB PDF with 1000+ images and never crashed.
However, I am unendingly infuriated by the inability to modify the page layout. The template collection is helpful but is never sufficient to meet the needs of a given page -- there are always tweaks needed.

When can we have the ability to modify photobook page layouts in LR?

It may be possible to do a custom template editor as a Lightroom plug-in. This would be the best option, but it would take a significant amount of work to make it general, and Adobe can make that work useless anytime by offering an updated book module. It would be nice to know what Adobe's plans are.
I am not familiar with LUA. However, modifying the template files seems relatively simple once you know the numerical values defining the page size and position of the photo cells within the page. Calculating the position is easy, if based on number of rows, columns, margins and space between cells as in the print module. I will try this at some point. Having your GUI would be helpful, it could also create the jpeg files in the template folder.

Based on the methods Santiago linked to above, a while back, I started working on a web based tool that would allow at least for the creation of custom templates.

The idea was to use this tool to create custom layouts, download the template file that you would add to Lightroom's templates folder, and then use them as needed inside Lightroom's Book Module.

I went as far as having a working user interface prototype, but then stopped working on it because I was sure Adobe would include it in the new Lightroom version.

This wasn't the case, so now I am thinking maybe I could resume working on it. You may view a preview here: http://pagebuilder.27shutterclicks.com

The struggle I was having with it was finding a way to convert jquery into Lua, maybe via some kind of parser that would allow for the generation of the needed file.

Since I am not that familiar with Lua, I was wondering if anyone else had any suggestions on how to go about it. I know there are some skilled people around here that are more familiar with Lua tools and Lightroom development.