LULU.COM
April L. Hamilton:
BTW, I don't mean to imply that I think Lulu is engaging in bad business practices...I'm just saying that Lulu's verbiage isn't specific enough to know exactly what rights you are, or aren't, signing away here. As with any contract, if there's any doubt about what you're agreeing to (and there's plenty of doubt in *my* mind where the PbL agreement is concerned), get the specifics first, and get them in writing.
April L. Hamilton:
Sorry for the triple posting...I don't see how it's possible to edit a post once you've made it here...since the time I wrote my blog post, it seems Lulu has removed the word "exclusive" from there PbL terms of service; I'll update my blog post to reflect this. It's a good sign, but again, those items I quoted from the terms of service seem to grant a de facto exclusive publication right to Lulu anyway. Like I said before, clarification is needed.
Ron Edwards:
Yeah, that's a good point, April. I asked for clarification about it when I used Lulu for Spione and insisted on using my own ISBN. The person I worked with said that Lulu was merely a service and dictated no exclusivity, and I could simply stop using it whenever I wanted. However, that person's not with Lulu any more, so I'm glad the official language changed too. I think I may have caught it in the transition/refinement period.
Also, I've used a local POD to print Spione for con purposes, and no one seems to have objected.
Best, Ron
jerry:
Quote from: April L. Hamilton on April 24, 2009, 06:49:02 AM
Jerry -
Excerpted direct from the PbY Terms of Svc you linked to:
1. You are granting publishing rights to Lulu to act as a publisher on your behalf to retailers and wholesalers globally.
3. Lulu will assign an ISBN to the title and Lulu.com will be listed as the publisher in all bibliographic feeds.
7. Lulu will be the sole source of bibliographic data on your book. Lulu will feed data to the U.S. ISBN Agency as well as to Bowker's Books In Print ® and other industry databases. The data will identify Lulu.com as the publisher.
9. You accept that Lulu.com is the publisher of record and that any creator revenue you earn through this ISBN meets the true & legal definition of the term 'royalty'.
11. You may not make available to the public a duplicate project with a lower Lulu Marketplace price while the original is active in Distribution.
#1 - 9 state (repeatedly) that Lulu will be the sole publisher of record for your book, and #11 may preclude making an ebook edition available---"duplicate project" isn't defined. That's why I said the language isn't terribly clear, but you may be required to return to Lulu for future printings (a common practice among self-pub companies, and a bad business practice). The only way to be sure is to contact Lulu directly---and get their response in writing. Personally, I prefer to use CreateSpace anyway since their costs are so much lower.
Hi, April. I'm still not seeing it.
#1 doesn't state anything about exclusivity or being the sole anything.
#11 also doesn't talk about exclusivity. It's almost the opposite of it: it says that you *can't* use Lulu if what you want to do is duplicate the book at a lower price on the Lulu storefront. It doesn't say that you can't make a lower price available somewhere other than Lulu. I was around when they added this; Lulu claimed that the bookstores (mainly, Amazon) complained about books on the Lulu store undercutting the list price; they threatened to stop selling Lulu books. (Before this, they didn't care; If you go here you can see a Lulu staff member in 2003 explaining how to sell a book at two different prices.)
Regardless, #11 is not about exclusivity, all it says is that if you sell your book through multiple Lulu distribution methods, you can't undercut the Distribution price (the ISBN price) in the Lulu Marketplace.
#3, #7, and #9 state that they are the sole publisher of record for that ISBN, and bibliographic data for the book that the ISBN belongs to. That's the way ISBNs work. The organization to whom orders must be ultimately sent is encoded in the ISBN. They're not really taking anything from you here, they're telling you how ISBNs work.
The main agreement is the only place I can find where they mention exclusivity; there, they specifically state that their interest is non-exclusive:
http://www.lulu.com/about/member_agreement.php#content
Jerry
redalastor:
Quote from: xenopulse on April 22, 2009, 07:41:36 PM
I am still using Lulu, but I'm looking at Amazon's CreateSpace now. It's cheaper than Lulu, comes with a free ISBN for your game book, and lists it on Amazon.com. You might want to look into that as well.
I just found out they actually don't really give you an ISBN. They bought a bunch of them, "assign" them to your book, reassign them to someone else if you unregister your book with them and keep the same ISBN for your book no matter how much you revise it which is absolutely contrary to the point of an ISBN.
How they manage to do that is simple, they don't actually register your book under that ISBN so the only point of having that ISBN is to have it sitting in an Amazon database and be displayed on Amazon.com. No one can actually find your book outside of amazon with that ISBN.
More details here:
http://forum.rpg.net/showthread.php?t=372957
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