Lulu.com, the site David Wendt used to publish the book, has been really slow for the last few days, so if you want to buy it then using a direct link will be (slightly) faster:
I just want to point out that Bob Young does not work for Red Hat anymore, so this definitely can't be considered PR for Red Hat (although he still serves on the board and owns stock). It would be accurate to say that this stunt provides PR for Young's football team and for his current company, Lulu.
By the way, the reviews on http://lulu.com/ are not posted there by Lulu, but by readers.
Some of the comments here disparage the idea of "self-publishing," but they fail to make any distinction between independent publishing and subsidy publishing (vanity presses).
Independent publishing is not unlike indie music, indie filmmaking, blogging, or any of the other recent revolutions in content publishing that allow individuals to take advantage of inexpensive ways to produce and distribute work for smaller audiences than those required by giant book, music, and film companies. Lulu provides tools for independent book publishers, as well as those who wish to sell other content, like songs or images, through the Internet.
Some of the books published this way lack good writing, editing, formatting or some combination of all three, but there's no reason to assume that an independently published book won't be as good or better than a book published by any small press. Most authors offer previews so you can get a sense of the book before buying it.
A vanity press (or subsidy publisher), on the other hand, makes its money by charging authors for services. This can be a straightforward business or an unscrupulous one. In either case, it is a very different business model from Lulu, which earns money only when authors like Mark Jeffrey make money, through a commission on each sale.
By way of a footnote, print on demand--the manufacturing technology used by Lulu in the case of The Pocket and the Pendant--is a process not specific to self-publishing at all. POD technology allows books to be manufactured literally one at a time. The ability to print books one at a time economically is the product of new manufacturing technology that barely existed five years ago. Large, mainstream publishers and academic presses are looking for ways to take advantage of POD technology to lower their costs and support a broader library of titles. In that respect, big publishers have a shared interest with independent publishers like Mark Jeffrey.
A PayPal donation would obviously be better in the sense that it would provide more money to the community in a more direct way, but some people who might not otherwise donate will be motivated by the idea of getting a physical something in exchange for their money. It's sort of like Public Radio offering you a coffee mug or a sweatshirt for your donation.
Keep in mind that Lulu was founded by Bob Young (Red Hat), so this is not that much of a stretch.
I think part of the point of this stunt is the manuals, which are at least potentially better than anything you could get elsewhere. The books are written by Colin Charles http://www.bytebot.net/blog/index.php, who is an interesting guy. Lulu's strength is obviously in providing a distribution platform for unconventional books; in essence this is just a way to package software with the books.
Re:Quoted the article twice today
on
The Long Tail
·
· Score: 1
Whether or not we can agree on a successful business model in Anderson's predictions, the events he describes are indeed coming to pass. The market for content is dissolving.
Last year, according to R.R. Bowker http://www.bowker.com/press/2004_0527_bowker.htm, 175,000 book titles were published in the US alone. That's more than any other year in history, and it doesn't even include all the titles being published without ISBNs through outfits like Lulu http://www.lulu.com/, which gives authors the option to distribute directly. And yet, the same report notes that sales of books are down. Why? More content; less consolidated sales.
This is bad news for big publishers and for brick and mortar retailers, whose profits have always relied upon the 80/20 rule described in the Wired article. It's good news, on the other hand, for authors (and bands and game designers, etc.) who are hoping for a sliver of the marketplace that they might not otherwise have gotten.
Lulu, where I work, currently sees over 50 new titles published a day by authors hoping for the attention of a few readers. That number is growing all the time. Most of these authors won't sell very many books. But the money being spent on books by the book-buying public is being divided into many more slices.
"How am I going to get rich if I only sell 100 books?" complains a typical author.
Well, the truth is that getting rich as an author has always been a bit like winning the lottery. The world can support very few Stephen Kings. But it can support an almost infinite number of Cory Doctorows http://www.craphound.com/down/ or Tucker Maxes http://www.tuckermax.com/. The publishing world (and I include music) is more democratic, but it's also less glamorous.
If you have content-- and people will always be compelled to generate more content, for better or worse -- in the digital world it costs you nothing to put it out there and hang a price tag on it (Lulu and CafePress are good examples). If it's out there, and it's valuable to someone, eventually it will sell. The economics of that marketplace, on the other hand, are not those of the publishing industry as it now exists.
>>There is no such thing as a free lunch, so what cost does this "self-publishing"
have?
If we are talking about Lulu.com in particular,
there are no specific costs involved on the publishing side, apart from the
effort required to put together a publishable book (which is considerable).
That said, an author would be well-advised to pay for editing, proofreading,
typesetting, and cover art prior to publishing the book. But many authors manage
to do all of this themselves, and to do a decent job (Basham, for example).
If an author wants expanded distribution, he/she should also purchase ISBN assigment
for $150, which will get the book listed on retail sites such as Amazon.com.
Lulu.com's 20% commission comes from sales of the book, not from charging the
author/publisher.
>>What kind of accuracy and quality can lulu.com ensure?
None.
>>What does it actually cost the student/reader if this material is not
accurate and they go to get certified and have been possibly mislead by one
man's material?
The marketplace is a pretty good judge when it comes to this kind of thing.
A bad CISCO certification book is not likely to sell very well. In Basham's
case, he actually gives away the electronic version for free, so it's pretty
easy to evaluate. But there is always risk when you buy something. I'm told
aphrodisiacs sell pretty well on the web, too.
>>What does it cost the student (or their school lab resources) to print
out this "free" book of 500 to 800 pages to gain the full benefit of a textbook
? (i.e. having the ability to read offline, highlight, etc. is still a tangible
benefit of printed books)
Of course, one of the nifty things about Lulu.com is that you can buy an actual
printed book (bound and all), so you don't have to print it out yourself. I'm
going to go out on a limb and suggest that any students who are printing out
800 page PDFs are probably doing so either at school or at work. So perhaps
a better question would be, how much is it costing employers and institutions?
The cost of a bound 800-page book through Lulu.com is likely to be upwards of
$20, depending on what royalty the author has set on the book.
>>What real costs do ambitious people like Mr. Basham incur to get their
material published--read the fine print on lulu.com services and/or just track
what it takes in personal time & $$ to write, edit, review, format, proofread,
and dissemninate this material)?
A better question for Matt Basham. I'm sure he spent an enormous amount of
time putting together the book. He is paid by the school at which he teaches,
however, and all the publicity he has garnered will be good for the school program.
>>What more does a commercial publisher provide than lulu.com?
Good question. Conventional publishers provide, in addition to a sophisticated
distribution mechanism, marketing. And marketing is key. Publishing through
Lulu.com means that an author/publisher must do his own marketing. But having
pointed that out, I have yet to find a conventionally published author who was
happy with the marketing his publishing company provided for his book. Marketing
is expensive and frequently unsuccessful. Lulu.com as a publishing tool (and,
in a larger sense, the web itself as a distribution tool) provides a means by
which the marketplace can access a work and determine its worth on its own,
in a democratic fashion, as opposed to being told what is valuable by marketers
with deep pockets. Because publishing through Lulu.com doesn't require the big
investment (risk) required by conventional publishing, then there is less pressure
to succeed, which allows more books with smaller potential readerships to reach
the marketplace. That's good for both authors and readers.
Don't misunderstand me--I agree that the publishers are the root of the problem.
Your example of the Latin textbook is perfect. But it's also important to understand
the costs that go into books in order to make a coherent argument. My point is
that there is at least one trade
organization of college bookstores that lobbies against publishers selling
books directly to students. It's perfectly reasonable that they would do so--that's
the role of trade organizations--but removing one of the middlemen would also
remove one element of the cost.
The price difference that a bookstore takes is also greater than you suggest.
We deal with many, many bookstores --college and otherwise--every day. The typical
bookstore requests a significant discount on books when ordering from a supplier
like us. When there is a third intermediary (distributor), the distributor and
the bookstore generally have to try to split a 50-55% discount among themselves.
The other 45-50% of the 'jacket' price of the book has to be split between the
manufacturer, the publisher, and the author.
To use one specific example, in the case of the most popular college textbook
published through Lulu.com, the college bookstores
buy the book directly from Lulu at a 38% discount from the cover price. Because
Lulu.com doesn't accept returns (the limitation of print on demand technology),
the bookstore also assumes the risk for any books that go unsold. The bookstore
buys the books at $12.89 per book and sells them to students at $17.75 for a
new copy. They also sell used copies.
Again, please don't misunderstand. I'm not questioning the right of bookstores
to make money--they make little enough of it as it is--just elucidating the
elements of the costs so as to make for a more informed discussion.
I would challenge the notion that there is a distinct category of books that are self-published. To some extent the categories of publisher and self-publisher are anachronistic.
Many independent publishers publish the work of a small number of writers.
Many writers establish "publishing companies" to distribute their own work.
And at this point, technologies like Lulu.com make publishing accessible to anyone and everyone.
The real difference, insomuch as there is a difference, is in the branding. O'Reilly, for example, has a brand that information seekers trust. So an O'Reilly book by an author you've never heard of is probably more appealing than a Lulu.com book by an author you've never heard of. But what if an author develops his own brand?
Along those lines, last week I found myself in the middle of a back-and-forth with a prominent tech journalist. His position was in essence that most of what is written is crap and that the editorial control exercised by publishers is essential. Fair enough. Most of what's written is crap, (although that doesn't seem to stop people from buying it when it's put out by major publishers).
But the dilemma you allude to, as I see it, is comparable to the dilemma presented by the emergence of the World Wide Web itself. "If anyone can put up anything on the Web," railed skeptics, "the whole thing is going to be useless. If you can't find the worthwhile information in the mountains of rotten information, what good will it be?"
Venerable institutions like the New York Times (justifiably) shuddered that individual sites--Matt Drudge's, for example--could compete with their own as sources for information. And yet, it has come to be. The Internet provides the means by which authors can develop their own brands. Matt Basham (the CISCO prof), for example, is in the process of developing his.
To some extent I can speak for Bob Young on this subject--the pricing situation with textbooks was very much the impetus for him to start Lulu.com. We are all in agreement on the problem.
Two points worth noting, however: when we (Lulu.com) talk to professors about textbook publishing, they broadly express the same concerns that you and others do about the books having become too expensive. Our experience is that professors are so interested in making cheaper books available to students that they are more likely to want to give away their IP than to sell it. From a Lulu perspective, we support their right to give it away, but if we are going to survive as a business we also hope that some authors of valuable content will charge something for their work.
The other thing I would point out is that it's actually the college bookstores that prevent the textbook publishers from offering downloads of textbooks. Believe it or not, they're acting the villain in this saga to some extent by pressuring the publishers not to disintermediate sales (I think that's the right word--but you get the idea).
The Lulu.com business model is based on a 20% commission on sales. Exact production costs vary depending on the number of pages and delivery format (electronic versions obviously have no production cost), but in all cases authors set their own royalty: they receive that royalty amount for every sale regardless of the production cost or Lulu commission.
The cost of a printed book to a customer who buys it is:
$4.53, the base cost for a perfect-bound printed book, + (# of pages x $.02 per page) + author royalty + Lulu commission
For downloads, the cost is simply the author royalty + Lulu commission. If the author royalty is $4, the Lulu commission would be $1, and the cost to the customer for the book would be $5.
Slashdot Mirror
Lulu.com, the site David Wendt used to publish the book, has been really slow for the last few days, so if you want to buy it then using a direct link will be (slightly) faster:
5 34231.shtml?tid=3]
Print version: http://www.lulu.com/content/168302
E-book version: http://www.lulu.com/content/168212
Or you could just wait until 1 a.m. and then place your order.
[On a side note, Newsforge posted a l-o-o-ong interview with Bob Young, Lulu founder and CEO, yesterday. You know... the Red Hat guy.: http://business.newsforge.com/business/05/11/01/1
I just want to point out that Bob Young does not work for Red Hat anymore, so this definitely can't be considered PR for Red Hat (although he still serves on the board and owns stock). It would be accurate to say that this stunt provides PR for Young's football team and for his current company, Lulu.
By the way, the reviews on http://lulu.com/ are not posted there by Lulu, but by readers.
Some of the comments here disparage the idea of "self-publishing," but they fail to make any distinction between independent publishing and subsidy publishing (vanity presses).
Independent publishing is not unlike indie music, indie filmmaking, blogging, or any of the other recent revolutions in content publishing that allow individuals to take advantage of inexpensive ways to produce and distribute work for smaller audiences than those required by giant book, music, and film companies. Lulu provides tools for independent book publishers, as well as those who wish to sell other content, like songs or images, through the Internet.
Some of the books published this way lack good writing, editing, formatting or some combination of all three, but there's no reason to assume that an independently published book won't be as good or better than a book published by any small press. Most authors offer previews so you can get a sense of the book before buying it.
A vanity press (or subsidy publisher), on the other hand, makes its money by charging authors for services. This can be a straightforward business or an unscrupulous one. In either case, it is a very different business model from Lulu, which earns money only when authors like Mark Jeffrey make money, through a commission on each sale.
By way of a footnote, print on demand--the manufacturing technology used by Lulu in the case of The Pocket and the Pendant--is a process not specific to self-publishing at all. POD technology allows books to be manufactured literally one at a time. The ability to print books one at a time economically is the product of new manufacturing technology that barely existed five years ago. Large, mainstream publishers and academic presses are looking for ways to take advantage of POD technology to lower their costs and support a broader library of titles. In that respect, big publishers have a shared interest with independent publishers like Mark Jeffrey.
http://www22.pair.com/csdc/car/carfre3.htm
http://www.lulu.com/kiehn
A PayPal donation would obviously be better in the sense that it would provide more money to the community in a more direct way, but some people who might not otherwise donate will be motivated by the idea of getting a physical something in exchange for their money. It's sort of like Public Radio offering you a coffee mug or a sweatshirt for your donation.
Keep in mind that Lulu was founded by Bob Young (Red Hat), so this is not that much of a stretch.
I think part of the point of this stunt is the manuals, which are at least potentially better than anything you could get elsewhere. The books are written by Colin Charles http://www.bytebot.net/blog/index.php, who is an interesting guy. Lulu's strength is obviously in providing a distribution platform for unconventional books; in essence this is just a way to package software with the books.
From last year (linking Nanowrimo and Lulu and the 'Crap Art' movement):e /2003-12-03-crapart_x.htm
Instant art movement flourishes on the Web (Reuters)
http://www.usatoday.com/tech/webguide/internetlif
Whether or not we can agree on a successful business model in Anderson's predictions, the events he describes are indeed coming to pass. The market for content is dissolving.
Last year, according to R.R. Bowker http://www.bowker.com/press/2004_0527_bowker.htm, 175,000 book titles were published in the US alone. That's more than any other year in history, and it doesn't even include all the titles being published without ISBNs through outfits like Lulu http://www.lulu.com/, which gives authors the option to distribute directly. And yet, the same report notes that sales of books are down. Why? More content; less consolidated sales.
This is bad news for big publishers and for brick and mortar retailers, whose profits have always relied upon the 80/20 rule described in the Wired article. It's good news, on the other hand, for authors (and bands and game designers, etc.) who are hoping for a sliver of the marketplace that they might not otherwise have gotten.
Lulu, where I work, currently sees over 50 new titles published a day by authors hoping for the attention of a few readers. That number is growing all the time. Most of these authors won't sell very many books. But the money being spent on books by the book-buying public is being divided into many more slices.
"How am I going to get rich if I only sell 100 books?" complains a typical author.
Well, the truth is that getting rich as an author has always been a bit like winning the lottery. The world can support very few Stephen Kings. But it can support an almost infinite number of Cory Doctorows http://www.craphound.com/down/ or Tucker Maxes http://www.tuckermax.com/. The publishing world (and I include music) is more democratic, but it's also less glamorous.
If you have content-- and people will always be compelled to generate more content, for better or worse -- in the digital world it costs you nothing to put it out there and hang a price tag on it (Lulu and CafePress are good examples). If it's out there, and it's valuable to someone, eventually it will sell. The economics of that marketplace, on the other hand, are not those of the publishing industry as it now exists.
I'll take a stab at a few of these questions.
>>There is no such thing as a free lunch, so what cost does this "self-publishing" have?
If we are talking about Lulu.com in particular, there are no specific costs involved on the publishing side, apart from the effort required to put together a publishable book (which is considerable). That said, an author would be well-advised to pay for editing, proofreading, typesetting, and cover art prior to publishing the book. But many authors manage to do all of this themselves, and to do a decent job (Basham, for example). If an author wants expanded distribution, he/she should also purchase ISBN assigment for $150, which will get the book listed on retail sites such as Amazon.com. Lulu.com's 20% commission comes from sales of the book, not from charging the author/publisher.
>>What kind of accuracy and quality can lulu.com ensure?
None.
>>What does it actually cost the student/reader if this material is not accurate and they go to get certified and have been possibly mislead by one man's material?
The marketplace is a pretty good judge when it comes to this kind of thing. A bad CISCO certification book is not likely to sell very well. In Basham's case, he actually gives away the electronic version for free, so it's pretty easy to evaluate. But there is always risk when you buy something. I'm told aphrodisiacs sell pretty well on the web, too.
>>What does it cost the student (or their school lab resources) to print out this "free" book of 500 to 800 pages to gain the full benefit of a textbook ? (i.e. having the ability to read offline, highlight, etc. is still a tangible benefit of printed books)
Of course, one of the nifty things about Lulu.com is that you can buy an actual printed book (bound and all), so you don't have to print it out yourself. I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest that any students who are printing out 800 page PDFs are probably doing so either at school or at work. So perhaps a better question would be, how much is it costing employers and institutions? The cost of a bound 800-page book through Lulu.com is likely to be upwards of $20, depending on what royalty the author has set on the book.
>>What real costs do ambitious people like Mr. Basham incur to get their material published--read the fine print on lulu.com services and/or just track what it takes in personal time & $$ to write, edit, review, format, proofread, and dissemninate this material)?
A better question for Matt Basham. I'm sure he spent an enormous amount of time putting together the book. He is paid by the school at which he teaches, however, and all the publicity he has garnered will be good for the school program.
>>What more does a commercial publisher provide than lulu.com?
Good question. Conventional publishers provide, in addition to a sophisticated distribution mechanism, marketing. And marketing is key. Publishing through Lulu.com means that an author/publisher must do his own marketing. But having pointed that out, I have yet to find a conventionally published author who was happy with the marketing his publishing company provided for his book. Marketing is expensive and frequently unsuccessful. Lulu.com as a publishing tool (and, in a larger sense, the web itself as a distribution tool) provides a means by which the marketplace can access a work and determine its worth on its own, in a democratic fashion, as opposed to being told what is valuable by marketers with deep pockets. Because publishing through Lulu.com doesn't require the big investment (risk) required by conventional publishing, then there is less pressure to succeed, which allows more books with smaller potential readerships to reach the marketplace. That's good for both authors and readers.
>>Is l
The price difference that a bookstore takes is also greater than you suggest. We deal with many, many bookstores --college and otherwise--every day. The typical bookstore requests a significant discount on books when ordering from a supplier like us. When there is a third intermediary (distributor), the distributor and the bookstore generally have to try to split a 50-55% discount among themselves. The other 45-50% of the 'jacket' price of the book has to be split between the manufacturer, the publisher, and the author.
To use one specific example, in the case of the most popular college textbook published through Lulu.com, the college bookstores buy the book directly from Lulu at a 38% discount from the cover price. Because Lulu.com doesn't accept returns (the limitation of print on demand technology), the bookstore also assumes the risk for any books that go unsold. The bookstore buys the books at $12.89 per book and sells them to students at $17.75 for a new copy. They also sell used copies.
Again, please don't misunderstand. I'm not questioning the right of bookstores to make money--they make little enough of it as it is--just elucidating the elements of the costs so as to make for a more informed discussion.
I would challenge the notion that there is a distinct category of books that are self-published. To some extent the categories of publisher and self-publisher are anachronistic.
I've made the argument that there is no such thing as self-publishing in more detail elsewhere, but to summarize:
The real difference, insomuch as there is a difference, is in the branding. O'Reilly, for example, has a brand that information seekers trust. So an O'Reilly book by an author you've never heard of is probably more appealing than a Lulu.com book by an author you've never heard of. But what if an author develops his own brand?
Along those lines, last week I found myself in the middle of a back-and-forth with a prominent tech journalist. His position was in essence that most of what is written is crap and that the editorial control exercised by publishers is essential. Fair enough. Most of what's written is crap, (although that doesn't seem to stop people from buying it when it's put out by major publishers).
But the dilemma you allude to, as I see it, is comparable to the dilemma presented by the emergence of the World Wide Web itself. "If anyone can put up anything on the Web," railed skeptics, "the whole thing is going to be useless. If you can't find the worthwhile information in the mountains of rotten information, what good will it be?"
Venerable institutions like the New York Times (justifiably) shuddered that individual sites--Matt Drudge's, for example--could compete with their own as sources for information. And yet, it has come to be. The Internet provides the means by which authors can develop their own brands. Matt Basham (the CISCO prof), for example, is in the process of developing his.
To some extent I can speak for Bob Young on this subject--the pricing situation with textbooks was very much the impetus for him to start Lulu.com. We are all in agreement on the problem.
Two points worth noting, however: when we (Lulu.com) talk to professors about textbook publishing, they broadly express the same concerns that you and others do about the books having become too expensive. Our experience is that professors are so interested in making cheaper books available to students that they are more likely to want to give away their IP than to sell it. From a Lulu perspective, we support their right to give it away, but if we are going to survive as a business we also hope that some authors of valuable content will charge something for their work.The other thing I would point out is that it's actually the college bookstores that prevent the textbook publishers from offering downloads of textbooks. Believe it or not, they're acting the villain in this saga to some extent by pressuring the publishers not to disintermediate sales (I think that's the right word--but you get the idea).
The Lulu.com business model is based on a 20% commission on sales. Exact production costs vary depending on the number of pages and delivery format (electronic versions obviously have no production cost), but in all cases authors set their own royalty: they receive that royalty amount for every sale regardless of the production cost or Lulu commission.
The cost of a printed book to a customer who buys it is:
$4.53, the base cost for a perfect-bound printed book, + (# of pages x $.02 per page) + author royalty + Lulu commission
For downloads, the cost is simply the author royalty + Lulu commission. If the author royalty is $4, the Lulu commission would be $1, and the cost to the customer for the book would be $5.
By the way, Basham's Lulu.com storefront is here: www.lulu.com/learningbydoing