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Lulu storefront of the day for Wednesday, September 29, 2004: The Soxer 2005 Calendar, the first charity calendar from www.sandalandsoxer.co.uk a web site dedicated to promoting the cutting edge of fashion in the wearing of socks with sandals.
Annie, another Lulu employee, pointed me to this one: Making Light, a publishing blog by Teresa Nielsen Hayden, an editor and author. Looks to be pretty lively and, based on a couple of posts dissecting the false promise of self-publishers like Authorhouse, I'm already impressed.
Lulu storefront of the day for Tuesday, September 28: Replica Watch Report, by Richard Brown.
Author takes matters into her own hands : I'm hoping this is not a trend--blogging stories about competitors' successes--but Publishers Marketplace pointed me to an interesting story about a woman whose mystery novel headed toward bestsellerdom from its humble origins with Authorhouse, one of Lulu's (less scrupulous) competitors. Most interestingly to me is that despite her early success, the author still had to shell out $10,000 in pre-printing and warehousing costs to get her book into retail outlets.
What do you have to do to become a best-selling, self-published author? This just in: shoot your older lover's wife. iUniverse has pre-printed 25,000 copies of Amy Fisher's autobiography in preparation for her appearance on Oprah. A stunt I can only wish I had thought of...
Lulu storefront of the day for Monday, September 27, 2004: A Modern Courtesan, by Natasha Alatyreva
From the book (the preview made available by the author looks interesting):
Eastern Europe… Unemployment, poverty, chaos… A young woman with a PhD finds herself on the streets. She can beg, she can die from hunger, or she can start writing letters. Using the Internet and numerous dating sites she is looking for a man to marry. She dreams about a happy family life. But the men she meets are looking only for sex, sightseeing and visas. Embittered and disappointed, she becomes a woman who lives off men. Not a woman who sleeps with men for money but a professional fiancée. Funny, quick-witted, sensitive and plucky, she cleans men’s pockets and goes through life light-heartedly. From a badly dressed, poor postgraduate she metamorphosed into a designer-clad, well-travelled woman. At last she achieves her heart’s desire and marries a rich man. But will she be able to retire from her “career” and settle down or will the temptation of yet another man’s attention, money and gifts prove to be too strong?
Lulu storefront of the day for Friday, September 24, 2004: Luke Hodgson's The Gates of Omin
Brave heroes, ancient evil, wicked birthrights, lurid covers. Sounds promising. From the preview:
He slid the hearty long sword into the sheath and locked the hilt into place.
Lulu storefront of the day for Thursday, September 23, 2004: Island of Fantasy - Memoir of an English Teacher in Korea, by Shawn Matthews
This guy also has a terrific blog about life as an ex-pat teacher in Korea. I haven't read the book yet, but it looks very promising. I love the idea.
Lulu storefront of the day for Wednesday, September 22, 2004: The BPM List: A Music Reference Guide for Mobile DJs, by Donald Brusca
A handy reference guide for the mobile disc jockey (DJ). This compilation of 7,500 popular songs specifies the title and artist of each song, its speed in beats-per-minute (BPM), its chart or release year, and its classification by musical style or genre.
Lulu storefront of the day for Tuesday, September 21, 2004: The Pocket and the Pendant, a novel by Mark Jeffrey
Max Quick was a very strange little boy indeed... But even he didn't suspect how strange -- until Time itself stops the world over. Now, he must unravel an ancient mystery drenched in magic Books, the lost Sumerian civilization, a curious rogue planet in our own solar system, and a bizarre, slushy nether-time called 'the Pocket'.
Racing desperately now against a clock that can no longer tick, Max struggles to recover a potent artifact known only as the Pendant. Yet, the closer he and his companions come to recovering it, the more they realize that their own true identities may yet sweep them into the machinations of the very adversaries they fight against...
(220 pages) Copyright Year: © 2004
Lulu's latest press release is out today. It describes Lulu's partnership with Xerox and ColorCentric (a Rochester-based printer) to bring on demand publishing to the public. Of course Xerox does a fantastic job creating demand for this kind of digital publishing technology, but ironically Xerox can't offer the public a way to access that technology directly. According to a recent story in the Rochester Democrat & Chronicle, every time a Xerox on demand publishing ad runs on TV, their corporate headquarters gets around fifty phone calls from authors who want to publish a book. But Lulu of course can put a publicly accessible face on this new and very powerful technology.
This is something Lulu planned to undertake way back when Creative Commons first launched (with Lulu as a partner, I should add), but in the jumble of competing priorities the task got lost, along with most of the other CC-related tasks we set for ourselves: Searching for Creative Commons on Yahoo!
I'm sure we'll come back to Creative Commons licenses at some point, although relatively speaking a small minority of the authors who use Lulu to publish their books, images, or music seem interested in alternative licenses. We support the idea. And demand will grow over time, I suspect.
Wired.com reports on a quixotic effort being launched to salvage for the public good all the works for which no copyright owner can be located:
These resources -- older books, films and music -- are often out of print and considered no longer commercially viable, but are still locked up under copyright. Locating copyright owners is a formidable challenge because Congress no longer requires that owners register or renew their copyrights with the U.S. Copyright Office.
Brewster Kahle, founder of the Internet Archive and Rick Prelinger, a film collector, want permission to digitize these so-called orphan works to create online libraries for free public access.
In a suit filed in March, the plaintiffs in Kahle v. Ashcroft argue that multiple changes to copyright law have essentially made it impossible for works to return to the public domain. They want to have these changes declared unconstitutional.
Forbes.com offers an interesting story on City of Heroes, a massively multiplayer Internet game that is apparently spreading like wildfire. Even I have run across the game, albeit at a party by way of listening to three late-twenty-something males obsessively poring over the details their superhero characters.
This story caught my attention for two reasons: first, because its developer originally planned to self-publish the game and sell it to a larger publisher. It just so happens (you heard it here first) that Lulu is, shall we say, seriously looking into launching on demand software self publishing (icky phrase) as a content category. Stay tuned on that subject. The Forbes story also interested me because it mentions a company my good friend Catherine works for, Second Life, in the sidebar. Catherine told me that at one point Second Life hosted a virtual book signing by Cory Doctorow, which piqued my interest quite a bit. I lack any real understanding of how the game works, but it appears that the characters create quite a bit of content on their own and it crossed my mind that there might be someway they could publish and sell that content via Lulu.
From the Guardian UK, another story on the boom in the sales of used and rare books made possible by the Internet.
By the book
Critics said the web would destroy small booksellers, but the internet has actually given them a new lease of life, says Richard Adams
The journalist points out the contrast between the idea of the giant Internet retailer, like Amazon, and the emergence of sites to support many small retailers, like Abebooks. But if you dig into the business models of the ostensible giants--Amazon and eBay spring to mind--you find that as in the used book market, the real power of those sites is to provide a distribution mechanism for networks of smaller merchants. Amazon sells a lot of books on its own, but it also allows you to sell your own books through its merchant program (it takes a hefty cut, of course). Likewise eBay has been credited with a mini-boom for small brick & mortar stores across the country that specialize in taking your used items and selling them on your behalf. I would suggest that Lulu mirrors this model as well--it exists to provide a mechanism for many individuals and businesses to sell their intellectual property themselves. And the 20% Lulu commission, I should note, is a lot better deal than Amazon's 55%.
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