I do mine as photobooks as well. I prefer hard covers to the soft cover as it protects the pages better. This won't probably help you as I ordered mine from Europe. It was done offline on desktop photobook creator software and then uploaded to their order site for printing. This year I did it as 8.5 x 12 inch hard cover book in landscape format. I am posting a few screen grabs of it from the laptop so image quality on here may not be too good but it will give you an idea.
Page 2-3 by
2Tiggies, on Flickr
Page 8-9 by
2Tiggies, on Flickr
Page 14-15 by
2Tiggies, on Flickr
It's very addictive! Often the sun will start coming up and I think "Oh no, I need to go to work in a few hours and haven't gone to sleep yet!"
I did a total of 38 pages