Lulu does nothing, they're just a middleman. The actual printing is done by ColorCentricCorp. Lulu hosts the pdfs, waits until they have some minimum total order and sends it off to CCC, who then print it, ship it to Lulu, and Lulu ships it to whoever ordered it.
That's why they're expensive, slow, and know very little about the various printing options and requirements - they're middlemen.
-Kyle Aaron on theRPGsite
Hmm.... so are there any other Print on Demand services out there that compete with LuLu? What about Amazon's print on demand service? Have you checked that out? I'm only asking because I've also been thinking about DIY publishing recently...
ReplyDeletesellfpublishing.com was another. For short on demand runs it is terribly expensive. There is very little break for anything less that 500 copies. That was around $6K for my general vicinity.
ReplyDeleteA lot of factors involved...and a local printing company might do better, or there's Alibaba if you want to negotiate a run with a chinese press.
Of course, if it was easy, everyone would be doing it right?
Hm. It didn't used to be just one company ... at one point (as I understood it) they were acting as middlemen for several different other suppliers of the print services (the company that did the jacketed hardcovers was entirely different from the one that did the perfect-bound digest and so on and so on ...) which was part of the brilliance of the concept; to tie all those disparate services together in that way.
ReplyDeleteI hadn't heard that they'd changed to a single-company front. Interesting.
If that's true, that that kind of consolidation is demonstrably feasible at Lulu's current rates, it means that we'll be seeing a larger number of competing clone companies pop up soon, most likely. Could be groovy :)
I think it's going too far to say that Lulu does nothing. Even if they're using another company to do the actual printing, they're still performing some services that the market seems to value.
ReplyDeleteFor example, Lulu's site makes it very easy to set up your own page to sell products (i.e. your own storefront), which is not a worthless service. From a cursory examination of the websites, it also looks like they make the publication and purchasing process easier. Lulu provides a measure of security to those buying; that is, customers recognize the Lulu name and might feel more comfortable making a purchase through Lulu than through an otherwise unknown start-up (e.g. "Joe's Games"). Lastly, I have to say that products I've received from Lulu have been packed extremely well, which is something that become increasingly valuable to me, as I've been ordering more and more books online.
I think that if Lulu were just a do nothing, leech off the work of others kind of company, they would be failing. The market seems to be saying otherwise. As donny_the_dm says, if it were easy, there'd be a lot of competition. And as S. John says, if Lulu is gouging us or not offering real value for the money, then other companies will soon rise up to challenge them. The market is brilliant, that way.
It’s easy enough to decide whether Lulu is adding value. Try going direct to ColorCentric. (...and doing everything Lulu does yourself.)
ReplyDeleteFor some people, dealing directly with ColorCentric may indeed make sense. For any of the things I have pipe-dreams of publishing, I think I’d still go through Lulu.
As far as I know, lulu works with different printers. The choice of printer depends on various factors: if the item is a hardcover or not, proximity to the buyer, etc.
ReplyDeleteFor instance: most orders from Spain and Portugal are printed in a printer located in southern Spain, that's not colorcentric.