Lulu offers POD publishing at zero up front cost, thus luring those who find free advertising for their spam. The postings I have seen so far both imply PG and Lulu are supporting thier spam. They advertise the quality of their texts as being from PG. One ofthem admits there may be errors.

There is probably nothing for PG to do except to get Lulu to take the PG off their customer's postings. If they want to host 15000 books on their computers for free that is their business. I quote my post to the LuLu foruml I have posted 2 books to Lulu at 15 cent royalty with added content to the PG text and I do not mention PG in the blurb. My "quality" book may soon be submerged in a flood of lulu spam.

Lulu offers a good service for self publishers who provide "content added" material. This offers the publisher to continually upgrade the product until it is in final form then market it through Lulu's various mechanisms.

However recently public domain texts lifted from project gutenberg have been appearing on Lulu. The accomopanying blurb states that www.lulu.com and Project gutenberg have joined forces to offer you these long out of print books. The implication is that somehow Lulu and PG are supporting this effort. PG is trademarked and there is no right to use the name in advertising; enforcing the trademark is another thin however for an all volunteer organization.

Software exists to move PG texts to a number of formats, ipod, ebook, etc including Lulu. So there is a real possibillity that most of the 15000 pg books could end up being hosted on Lulu. No review copy would ever be required, so the posting for the converter would be free. Lulu could end up hosting the entire pg corpus for free in a kind of publishing spam. The books are listed with a royalty of $1 to $2. One is published with a $1.59 royalty, and claims that $1 will be contriputed to PG of every book sold. This leaves only 27 cents for the seller.

Iin one case the publisher had re-copyrighted the book and in the other had listed it as Public Domain. Nothing wrong with this, but the copyright only applies to "new material" and certainly not the entire book. In one case a ISBN number was listed, so Lulu might have gotten some revenue from that if the ISBN is real. One of the books was listed as 5000 in sales, so I imagine that is how many Lulu has in its archive. It may soon get 14,999 more!

Another feature with Lulu is you never know who is selling the book. Lulu distributes it, but the real seller is someone else, unknown. This may raise legal issues about ultimate responsibilitiy.

People like myself who provide added content at no or minimal royalty will be unhappy to see our listing efforts buried in an avalanche of Lulu spam. At the very least Lulu should require permission before violating trademark laws.

The additional cost of hosting all these books could end up in forcing up front charges on Lulu providers or radically restructuring the way Lulu operates, neither of which is desirable in my humble opinion.