Lulu.com

Lulu is a printing company with its headquarters at Morrisville, North Carolina. In addition to printing it also offers online-order fulfillment. The brand name is derived from the concept of a lulu as an old-fashioned term for a remarkable person, object, or idea. The company's CEO is Red Hat co-founder Bob Young.

Authors who publish/print works through Lulu retain the copyrights to such works. Optional services offered by the company include ISBN assignment, and distribution of books to retailers requesting specific titles (returns are not accepted, which limits distribution to physical bookstores). Electronic distribution is also available.

Overview

Lulu Press Inc. is predominantly a self-publishing company, launched in 2003, and based in Morrisville, North Carolina, in the United States. The company CEO is Robert Young, and the president is Gart Davis.

Lulu's ordering-and-publishing system is open and automated; interaction with authors is done exclusively through the Internet, and anyone with access to the Internet may access it. Material is submitted in digital form for hard publication. Guided by instructions posted on the company's website, authors wishing to publish their material upload files to the site. After an approval process the content of these files will be published verbatim and unedited within the limits of the technology to do so. A live, online chat-service is usually available to help customers navigate the instructions posted on the website. The author is not assigned a contact person such as an editor. Lulu provides no phone support. Mail and phone contact information is conspicuously absent from their website. This is an experimental approach that reduces support and editing costs and thus provides access to publishing to those who would otherwise not be able to afford a vanity press or find a willing publisher.

While the focus tends to be on books, magazines, calendars, and other print publications, Lulu also publishes digital media such as music CDs, videos, and ringtones. Available to authors are options corresponding to the media type—for example, an author uploading a novel can select a type of binding, layout style, and cover art, and can set the percentage of profit desired. An author can upload a file in .pdf format (or can choose to have Lulu convert it), and can download and preview the final draft before printing.

Unlike traditional publishers, Lulu has no inventory on hand as material is not printed in advance. Instead, after an order is made, it is placed in a queue at a contracted print-on-demand printer, in a system referred to as "POD." Printing takes one to two weeks, after which the finished product is shipped. There can be small variations in published material when the job is moved from one contract printer to another.

When a book or project is first entered or revised, the author is required to go purchase a draft copy which goes through the regular order process with one or two weeks delay, and then to approve the printed result before the change takes effect. After reviewing the book, the author can approve the book online at the Lulu website, or, if the author does not approve the book, another draft copy with shipping is purchased and the whole revision process is repeated until the final draft is approved. According to the Lulu website, shipping of the final project (upon order) occurs approximately another six to eight weeks after the final draft is approved, online, by the author. Thus, a book with one revision and one week for shipping may take up to 14 weeks as per the website guidelines.

The actual printing is done by third-party contractors in the United States and the United Kingdom (although anyone in the world with internet access can publish material). In addition to offering several book sizes, Lulu also offers black-and-white and color printing, photography books, CDs and DVDs, calendars, and hardcover books with or without dust jackets.

Project cost is determined based on factors such as the number of pages in a publication (or "page count"), type of binding, and the profit margin set by the author. From the profit, 80% goes to the author and 20% to Lulu, although Lulu claims no commission if the work is offered royalty-free. As an example, a 8 1/2 by 11 432 page paper back book with $4 author margin shows up on Amazon for $36.00 $35.95. Upon a change in price the author is required to purchase another copy of the book and approve it, as for content revisions.

While Lulu doesn't charge for uploading material, a number of other fee-related services are offered, including ISBN-assignment, cover design, general marketing, and making publications available through Amazon and other online retailers. Lulu also maintains an online store, "Lulu Marketplace," which offers publications for sale on their website at no up-front charge to the author, collects payments, and tracks royalties.

Lulu offers three different levels of distribution services: "Lulu Marketplace," "Published By You," and "Published By Lulu (formerly known as "Global Distribution")." Depending on the level of distribution, Lulu may or may not require exclusive rights.

Licensing

Copyright remains with the author. "Published by Lulu" distribution requires a contract, which may be incompatible with open content, such as GFDL, or Creative Commons licenses. For its other distribution services besides "Published by Lulu," however, Lulu offers to use open content licenses. Contract terms 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.

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. 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 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.

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

Wholesale policies

Lulu, unlike most publishers, does not accept returns of unsold books from bookstores. In addition, the wholesale discount is much smaller than most bookstores are accustomed to — as little as 5% at typical quantities of less than a hundred. These facts may make it difficult for authors to have their books carried in bookstores, though they're not an issue for online book sites like Amazon.com. Lulu states that its goal is "to have a million authors selling 100 copies each, rather than 100 authors selling a million copies each."

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 policy states that users submitting PDF files for books to be published via Global Distribution must generate them with Adobe Acrobat.

External links

• Company home page
• Interview with Bob Young about Lulu on This Week in Tech