Publishing for dummies

On a recent trip to Calgary I picked up a local paper and spotted an article about Lulu, an online publishing service that makes turning your words into thin tree format i.e. books, a piece of cake. What is more the financial side of it is very attractive too - if you don't want an ISBN number for your book then there is no upfront cost at all, you charge the basic production cost (2 cents per b/w page plus $4.53 for the cover) plus a royalty, and Lulu take a 20% of the royalty you charge. You can even choose to charge no royalty at all and Lulu take no cut (but are obviously managing to make some money on the production costs). If you allow downloadable copies then production costs are zero and hence you can publish your work electronically for free, pretty cool huh?

Furthermore if you want a "real book" you can pay $34.95 up front an get an ISBN number, listing in "Books in Print" and have a year of listing with Amazon marketplace. For $149.95 you get listed in the Ingram database and printing is then done by an external company (LSI) with lower costs. This permits distribution by the big guys like Amazon, B&N, Borders, and even overseas companies.

As far as I'm concerned this is publishing the way it should be with modern technology and low transparent overheads. The only thing that is missing is editing and marketing services. I can see a real cottage industry of editors and book promotion companies lining up to offer their services to Lulu book authors - for an additional cut of the royalty or a fixed price.

After that happens I think its only a matter of time before someone like Google or Microsoft try to snap up Lulu and offer stuff like book versions of blogs for those of us that write ones with substantial publishable content which is not dependent on lots of hyperlinks, that would probably apply to photo blogs. In such a case the issue of copyright infringement might rear its ugly head - just how much of online content is copyrighted, and how much simply regurgitates (illegally) copyrighted material in largely unchanged format thus making it totally unsuitable for publishing. I'm sure as Lulu catches on we can expect a rash of suits of copyright infringement against its authors for which it may just be a case of publish and be damned.