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Lulu.com

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Lulu is a self-publishing company headquartered in Morrisville, North Carolina, offering print-on-demand publishing and online order fulfillment for authors, musicians and businesses via easy-to-use digital tools. Although Lulu does not require setup fees from authors for its basic services; it also only provides technical support via online forums and live chat features.

Overview

"Creators" access Lulu's digital publishing tools through its website, while actual printing and delivery is handled by third-party companies worldwide. Creators enter information about their publication, upload the material in a supported format, select binding and other options, and set the amount of profit they wish to earn on each copy. Lulu converts the document to PDF and the creator calculates the retail price. Price is determined by the print cost and user revenue. Lulu has an 80/20 split of the revenue; 80% goes to the creator and 20% goes to Lulu.

The creator retains full copyright and creative control of the content, and Lulu's printing and retail rights are non-exclusive. The creator can order copies at a reduced rate to sell directly. This discount is generally not enough to make further wholesale distribution by the creator practical; however, as it is less than the discount distributors or retailers would expect on material they are to resell, it is advantageous to both creator and customer. Optional services include ISBN assignment and distribution of books to other book retailers. Electronic distribution is also available.

Lulu does not market or promote customer books. In the United States, few retail book stores carry books published by Lulu.com because of Lulu's low discounts (around 5%) and the fact that most books are non-returnable.[citation needed]

History

The company's CEO is Red Hat co-founder Bob Young. The brand name is derived from the concept of a lulu as an old-fashioned term for a remarkable person, object, or idea.

Since its founding, Lulu has expanded the range of book sizes to include the following (given here in inches): 6x9 (novel), 8.5x11 (US letter), 6.625x10.25 (comic book), 9x7 (landscape), 7.5x7.5 (square), 8.5x8.5 (larger square), 4.25x6.875 (pocket), 6.14x9.21 (royal), 7.44x9.68 (crown quarto), 8.27x11.69 (A4) and 4.42x6.875 (Pocket size). Additionally, hardcover casewrap books are available in 6x9 (novel) and 8.25 x 10.75. Hardcover dust jackets are available in 6x9 (novel).

In addition to offering a number of book sizes, Lulu also offers black and white and color printing, photo books, CDs and DVDs, calendars, and hardcover books with or without dust jackets.

Distribution services

Lulu offers three different levels of distribution services, called "Lulu Marketplace, "Published By You", and "Published By Lulu "(formerly known as Global Distribution).[1] Lulu Marketplace is free to the author.

Criticism

UK publications

In September 2006, Lulu came under criticism for changing the terms of its global distribution package and incurring a price rise of around 70% on all books sold in the United Kingdom. [2] Some authors see this as effectively pricing them out of the UK marketplace.

On September 19, 2006, Lulu authors based outside of the United States received documentation[3] informing them they would be subject to a 30% tax on their royalties gained through sales in the United States. Non-U.S. authors were told by Lulu to apply for exemption from these taxes.[citation needed]

Regarding this issue, the CEO of Lulu, Bob Young, has stated, "You are quite right, we messed up, badly,"[4] Lulu states that it has attempted to mitigate the problem, that it has no choice but to follow UK tax laws, and that part of the issue has been currency exchange rates.

Lack of full support for open formats

Although Lulu's roots connect it to the open-source software movement, it does not fully support PDF files generated using open-source software. Lulu's official policy states that if the user is uploading a PDF file, it must be generated by Adobe Acrobat.[5][6] Books may fail to print if the PDF was not generated by Adobe Acrobat.[7][8] In reality, the situation is somewhat more complicated than suggested by a literal reading of Lulu's policies, and users have three options:

  1. Submit a PDF file generated by Adobe Acrobat.
  2. Submit a word processor file, which Lulu converts automatically to PDF.
  3. Submit a PDF file generated by an application other than Adobe Acrobat.

Option 2 is compatible with open-source word processors such as OpenOffice, but imposes limitations on the types of PDF files that can be used, both because a word processor is not a desktop publishing application and because the user is limited to the features supported by Lulu's converter. The last option is theoretically forbidden by Lulu; in reality, it may either fail or succeed, because Lulu's various printers impose inconsistent and undocumented restrictions on the files they accept.[9][10] The success or failure of printing may depend on undocumented factors such as limits on the number of layers, or the version number of the PDF-generating library, such as ghostscript, used by the software that produces the PDF.

Licensing

"Published by Lulu" distribution requires a contract,[11] which may be incompatible with open content, such as GFDL,[12] or Creative Commons licenses. For its other distribution services besides "Published by Lulu," however, Lulu offers to use open content licenses.[13] Contract term were changed in 2007, and it is not as easy to tell whether the new version is compatible with copyleft; the new version does not explicitly discuss exclusivity, but includes requirements with which the author might not be able to comply if the book was copylefted, since the author would not have control over other people's ability to publish the work independently.

Short Margins for Bookstores

It is easy to believe that "Published by Lulu" books, with an ISBN and "marketing channels", can be marketed to real brick and mortar bookstores or chains such as Barnes and Noble or Borders. Lulu does have one place in their online documentation where they acknowledge that this is essentially impossible. At the same time they have many places where they suggest that a writer can achieve a real measure of success, which is not surprising as ultimately they market dreams to many of the writers who publish there. They carefully do not indicate what that "success" is likely to consist of.

The reality of a writer's prospects with Lulu (and other Print on Demand publishers) is perhaps best summarized in a warning[14] on the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA) website which points out a 2006 article in the Times UK in which its founder stated the company's goal: "...to have a million authors selling 100 copies each, rather than 100 authors selling a million copies each." According to this warning to would-be Science Fiction authors, a Lulu bestseller is "a book that sells 500 copies. There haven't been many of them."

With very few exceptions (mostly topical works with very specific markets) an author has to sell their books in bookstores to achieve sales of as few as 10,000 copies of a work (a level that would be deemed abject failure by a real publisher). Lulu books are available to real bookstores only at extremely short margins, non-returnable, and often with retail prices that are too high for the work of an unknown author to sell anyway. Lulu's dream may be to enable its million authors to sell 100 copies each. But is that the dream of those authors?

See also

References

  1. ^ http://www.lulu.com/help/index.php?fSymbol=distro_service&fLangCode=EN
  2. ^ http://www.lulu.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=45945
  3. ^ http://people.lulu.com/blogs/view_post.php?post_id=24382
  4. ^ http://www.lulu.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=45945&postdays=0&postorder=asc&start=100
  5. ^ http://www.lulu.com/help/index.php?fSymbol=distro_requirements
  6. ^ http://athleticaid.com/yaquinapress/PDF-FAQ.html
  7. ^ http://athleticaid.com/yaquinapress/PDF-FAQ.html
  8. ^ http://www.lulu.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=25428
  9. ^ http://athleticaid.com/yaquinapress/PDF-FAQ.html
  10. ^ http://www.lulu.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=25428
  11. ^ http://www.lulu.com/help/index.php?fSymbol=pbl_agreement
  12. ^ http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html
  13. ^ http://www.lulu.com/help/index.php?fSymbol=license_what_kinds
  14. ^ http://www.sfwa.org/beware/printondemand.html
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