It used to be called Vanity Publishing - releasing books that don’t sell enough copies to support the sort of print run a publisher needs to make a profit. But thanks to the "long tail" economics of the internet, and aided by Xerox’s latest print-on-demand technologies, there is now a race on to tap a part of the market that most publishers have long stayed clear of.

Canadian serial entrepreneur Bob Young tells me he expects revenues from his website, Lulu.com, to double to $25m this year, before doubling again in 2008, even though he says the average print run for the books he publishes is "less than two" (these are just promises, but they still suggest pretty fast growth for a site only launched in 2004.)

The trick is to apply the eBay model to book publishing. Instead of items to auction, readers submit digital versions of their books (eventually Lulu may introduce a version of eBay’s listing fee to weed out the clutter, Young says, though it’s still too early for that.)

Individual copies are then printed off on demand and dispatched to meet orders. Lulu outsources that part to commercial printers who face the dirty work - and capital investment - of turning these digital promises into reality. The cost of producting a 200-page softback book is around $7, says Young - authors pick their own selling price and split anything above the production costs with Lulu.

The most profitable authors for this sort of business are people who have a built-in audience for their work, and who can bring new buyers to Lulu - professionals who want to publish technical manuals for an internal corporate audience, for instance, or amateur historians producing work for a local historical society.

Plenty could go wrong. Lulu may not generate enough revenue to cover its fixed costs. Service quality may suffer. A forthcoming overhaul of the site’s user interface, intended to create different experiences for authors depending on the type of book they want to publish, may not work out. An attempt to branch out into DVDs and other forms of media may fizzle.

And then there’s Amazon. Last week the online retailer overhauled its own vanity publishing arm, renaming it CreateSpace and scrapping its earlier set-up fees. One of the things Young hopes will give him an edge over the internet juggernaut: a third of his sales are already coming from Europe, and his model should help him to stretch further around the world without facing the heavy fixed infrastructure costs of an Amazon. Taking on Amazon in a part of the online book business, however, does not sound like a job for the faint of heart.

August 15, 2007 11:58pm in Internet | Comment