I looked at SEOmoz's list of Web 2.0 awards, and my eye was naturally drawn to "books." I noticed that Library Thing, which is one of (cue the music, start twirling on the mountain in the dirndl) my favorite Things, was only third-place winner, so I spent a while checking out Lulu, the first-place winner in the books category.
Oh, no! Lulu is a vanity, oops, excuse me, self publishing service! Now it will be a snap for every idiot, oops, I mean every well-meaning person, who writes a book, to get it published. If I sound just a bit negative about this very smoothly-designed and well-presented "tool," it's because over the years I've dealt with a number of author wannabees, each convinced that their book is the next absolute best-seller. And I've handled quite a few slightly "off-looking" vanity press volumes which always seem to end up in my inbox when they are mailed to my branch (though they don't linger there long; they're off to Collection Development as soon as I see what they are). Although there are always going to be a few self-published books that make great reading, and sometimes get picked up by a standard publisher or talk-show host, most that I've seen are, well, of personal interest only.
On the other hand, Lulu would enable someone writing a family history to create a few professional-looking, relatively inexpensive copies for relatives; it would also be great for local history, or really for any book that is of such limited interest that a non-online (nonline? brick-and-mortar?) publisher wouldn't be interested. I wonder how Lulu's costs compare with those of the small local publishers who do this kind of thing now? The advantage of Lulu and similar online publishers is that they need not actually make any more copies than are requested at a given time; the book can lurk in cyberspace until another person asks for it.
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Last year I attended a national genealogy conference and of course I couldn't get to every session that sounded interesting to me. They recorded most of the sessions and offered them on Lulu for download. I downloaded the recording I wanted and then listened to them on my iPod as I drove to work. Nice way to get the content I wanted and be able to listen to it when it was convenient for me.
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