Antipodean Summer Reading => Lulu.com

I am reading two books at the moment: The Long Tail and 50 Great E-businesses and the minds behind them.
The Long Tail is by Chris Anderson and was written in 2004. Call me a late adopter. I thought I understood the long tail, but reading the book introduces the idea of the democratization of production, aggregators and findability. I picked it up in a discount bin in a bookstore in Toowoomba, Queensland while looking for something to veg out on before a wedding. Perhaps I should tell Chris he was not a “hit”. There, anyway.
50 Great E-businesses and the minds behind them is a book by a Melbourne couple published in mid 2007. I work for one of the companies mentioned in their book so it caught my interest. But there are so many others that I had: a) not heard of; or b) heard of but nor seriously checked out.
One of the former is Lulu.com. Both books mentioned Lulu.com, which piqued my interest. And they won a Web 2.0 award. Founded by RedHat co-founder Bob Young, it democratizes publishing. Last year I was looking at publishing a book on ehcache. I had 150 pages that I had put a fair bit of work into. I thought it would be a simple matter of finding a technical publisher and then sitting back and getting royalties. NOT. Bob discovered the same thing and decided to do something about it.
I have had my ehcache book self-published up on Lulu.com for a few weeks now. The only real issue I came across was Lulu’s requirement to embed fonts. The best answer I have come up with is to use Save As PDFX-3 from Preview, which embeds fonts while retaining clear previews. Lulu is great: I get to publish my book and people get to buy it. And the middleman is reasonable.
See http://www.lulu.com/content/1538666 to see the result.
And maybe I am three years late to the ideas introduced in the Long Tail, but I think there is, to use a much abused term, a paradigm shift underway. In Australia it is going to take low cost high speed broadband for the digital media long tail to really work.
BTW, one job I have to do is to upgrade Movable Type to fix the spam problem I have with this blog. Perhaps a job for the Xmas break. If anyone wants to comment, please just email me and I will post it.

By Greg Luck

As Terracotta’s CTO, Greg (@gregrluck) is entrusted with understanding market and technology forces and the business drivers that impact Terracotta’s product innovation and customer success. He helps shape company and technology strategy and designs many of the features in Terracotta’s products. Greg came to Terracotta on the acquisition of the popular caching project Ehcache which he founded in 2003. Prior to joining Terracotta, Greg served as Chief Architect at Australian online travel giant Wotif.com. He also served as a lead consultant for ThoughtWorks on accounts in the United States and Australia, was CIO at Virgin Blue, Tempo Services, Stamford Hotels and Resorts and Australian Resorts and spent seven years as a Chartered Accountant in KPMG’s small business and insolvency divisions. He is a regular speaker at conferences and contributor of articles to the technical press.