Publishing in 2007

I just stumbled across lulu.com. I'm sure this is old news to a lot of people, but I found it very interesting in two senses. First, it is interesting as in exciting. A cheap way for anyone to self-publish most anything without a sizable investment in potential paperweights (everything is print-on-demand). I see this site and others like it as a huge benefit to schools publishing yearbooks, for example. I was on the yearbook staff my junior and senior years in high school. Something like this would have saved untold hours of work, saved the school hundreds of dollars, and resulted in a far better product.

I also find it interesting as in the Chinese curse. Editors and publishers serve a valuable filtering function. If you want to see what the world of the written word looks like without that filter, spend some time on Blogger. I think it is safe to say that the quality of the writing is somewhat... er... uneven. But all I waste on Blogger is my time. On lulu.com, I'd be wasting my time and my money to find out that a really interesting-sounding author is a worse writer than the typical middle-school blogger. Yes, it is true that the publishing industry misuses its filter function to suppress dissenting viewpoints, without which a republic cannot survive. But a lot of what lands on an editors desk just plain sucks. I suspect some time on lulu.com would easily confirm that statement.

Having said all that, I just bought a book from lulu.com. I know the author and his work from other sources (Flickr), so I feel reasonably safe that I didn't just throw $25 down a rat hole.

May we live in interesting times.