Thing 17: LULU

I started out scrolling through the list of the top 20 Web 2.0 sites and looking through several of them. I was interested in the photo sites, but we have already used Flicker and Picasa. I checked out one of the spreadsheet sites, but decided I still had little use for spreadsheets, and eventually moved on to Lulu.

Lulu is quite an extensive publishing site. For the casual user, it allows one to create calendars with their own pictures, photo books, pamphlets, fully bound books, poetry books, and textbooks. There are template to choose from and text can either be uploaded or typed in at the site. For the more serious publisher, books can be created with the help of editors and designers (for a fee), can be assigned an ISBN number (for a fee), and can be posted for sale. With this type of self publishing, the actual copy of the book is not printed until a buyer has requested it, then Lulu prints and ships the book and the author gets a portion of the sales.

Books and creations can be made public on the site and people can read and comment on them. Forums and blogs about books and writing are hosted at Lulu. Each author can set up a "storefront" with the name of their choosing to display all their creations.

The introductory video claims that there are hundreds of thousands of individuals who visit and use Lulu, which would make it a seem like a good jumping off place for the frustrated writer. It also makes the site good for the niche writer/reader since quantity of sales is not a concern. The opportunities for discussion and research seem very promising.

I have made photo books at Shutterfly and compared the Lulu options with that. In Shutterfly I had made a book featuring old family photos and was able to add text about the individuals in the photos. In Lulu, I could add captions to photos, but not quantities of text. Shutterfly also gave me more flexibility in layout and more editing capabilities. I could upload photos once to Shutterfly and then use them in a variety of ways. In Lulu, photos must be uploaded separately for each project in which they are going to be used--a drawback, but at least they upload very rapidly.

Several years ago I wrote a short book about American architecture and illustrated it with drawing done in Adobe Illustrator. I also had created a book in Quark. Unfortunately, none of those files can be uploaded into Lulu. I exported several of the Illustrator images as jpegs and could upload them then but that didn't solve my problems. A "book" in Lulu must have at least 100 pages. Less than that qualifies for a poetry book. The templates for pages in the poetry book have rigid frames for photos and text. There is no photo editing capability for pictures uploaded that are a different height and width ratio, and in order to upload a full page of text, I had to copy and paste sections onto several pages of the book. I think the site would work better if the requirements for the artwork and the limitations of text were clearly spelled out so that pages could be designed in other programs to fit the templates.

The calendar option is easy to use. Photos upload rapidly to the site and the creation process lets one add notations onto days on the calendar--holiday, birthdays, etc. Again, some clear directions about file size and ratio before uploading would be useful. I'm not sure this site is cost effective for someone wanting just a single copy of a calendar, but probably would be for someone who is hoping to sell copies of one.

Projects that are in progress can be saved and worked on at a later time, which is a very good feature.

Lulu appears to have a great range of uses. Some projects can be created very simply, others would definitely require a great deal of planning and preparation. The opportunity to interact with a large number of people interested in similar topics is also a great feature. Like some of the other web 2.0 tools, this is one that merits more investigation.