Self-publishing made simple

Courtesy of a posting on the PubLib listserv, I was led to an interesting self-publishing site, called Lulu. It claims to be "fast, easy and free" and it looks as though all those claims are true.

Basically you upload a word processing document, choose from a list of formats the desired size and style of your book, select or upload cover art, and hit convert. Your word processing document is then converted to a pdf file in the selected size and becomes available for printing. Printing is done on demand, thus there is no inventory and no cost until an order is placed. Lulu sets a cost price (reflecting their cost to produce the book) and you enter your desired royalty. Cost plus royalty equals the selling price and Lulu gets a percentage of your royalty as a fee. Costs are surprisingly low- $15 for a dust-covered hardcover, although the use of color pages increases the cost somewhat. Lulu also hosts your published work for free. You also hold copyright to your published work.

"Our revenue comes from a small commission on the profits of each item sold. Lulu only makes money if you do. As a creator, you set the amount of Creator Revenue on the items you publish. The Lulu commission is 25% of the Creator Revenue you set (or 19¢, whichever is greater). The Lulu commission therefore equals 20% of the total profit of each item sold."

The list of their all-time best sellers is interesting- it includes programming guides as well as The Ultimate Tatoo guide.

On demand books

I was reading an article from the New York Times on BookExpo America that mentioned OnDemandBooks.com, which has created the Espresso Book Machine.

From their website:
"On Demand Books LLC. is planning to become the first company to globally deploy a low cost, totally automatic book machine (The Espresso Book Machine), which can produce 15 - 20 library quality paperback books per hour, in any language, in quantities of one, without any human intervention. This technology and process will produce one each of ten different books at the same speed and cost as it can produce ten copies of the same book. ODB has two machines currently deployed (one at the World Bank InfoShop in Washington DC, and one at the Library of Alexandria in Egypt).

ODB is also finalizing technology to access a vast network of content that can be accessed and produced via The Espresso Book Machine Network. The content of this library will reside in numerous locations from a multitude of sources. Our system will accept multiple formats, and fully respect licenses and rights."

As the company's co-founder said, "This could replace the entire supply chain that has been in existence since Gutenberg."

Their website is very rudimentary- a single page with the above claim, some contact info and some video clips that took forever to download. The machine kind of looks like Wallace and Grommet invented it.

I also wonder if reproducing books is really the wave of the future. It seems contrary to the research and development efforts in the electronic access to printed material that has been the focus of the future.