John Heilemann has a great profile of Red Hat founder Bob Young and his publishing startup, Lulu, in June 2006's edition of Business 2.0. Bob and I spoke at an open source conference together 2-3 years ago in Toronto, and I remember my reaction when he told me about Lulu. It was, as best I can remember:
"Huh? He left Red Hat for this?"
Today Lulu is doing $1M each month, and it's clear that his open source publishing business has got legs (36,000 - 91,000 book sales/legs per month, to be exact). The whole user-generated content hoopla largely leaves me unmoved, but there's something to Bob's idea.
"We're trying to empower this exchange of content between creators and consumers, so we think of ourselves more like being the eBay of digital content.A big aspiration, but Bob has never thought small.
There's something to it. I'm with Nick Carr on most things - "expert" content is probably best handled by experts. But in the world of fiction, I'm not sure I trust the editors and publishers to find the best literature. At least, not always. Yes, they've given me Mark Twain, Flannery O'Connor, and Fyodor Dostoevsky, but they've also given me (well, you - I refuse to read him) Dan Brown and those Fabio "novels."
I'm sure Lulu will churn out its share of Dan Brown-esque rubbish, but if it can find even one Dreiser or Trollope for me, it's worth it. (And what genius to not actually print the book until someone pays. I might even put together a collection of blog posts and essays, or perhaps my Masters thesis - I'm not out anything if no one cares, and maybe I'll make a few dollars....)
Posted by Matt Asay on May 24, 2006 07:37 PM
