Fast Cheap Intuitive

After I read Emmet Connolly’s blog post about creating a book on Lulu.com from all the articles he’d been meaning to read, I thought, “What a great idea. I need to do that.” Like Emmet, I had tagged numerous articles with my del.icio.us account with the intention of reading them, but knew that I was probably not likely to actually read them on my laptop anytime soon- or ever. But I was much more likely to read them if they were in a book that I could bring on the bus with me on my commute to work. Of course, I had to name it after my latest catchphrase 😉

After reviewing the help info at Lulu.com, I put together an Open Office document formatted according to their specs for a 5.5 x 8.5 book and pasted in the text from 25 articles I chose from my del.icio.us account, which ended up being about 125 pages long with fairly small type. That took about 45 minutes or so. Then I created a PDF, uploaded it to Lulu, chose settings for the cover, paid the $6 or so for the book, and then submitted. I was really impressed with how intuitive their interface is. That was on Friday evening. I had the book delivered to my office the following Tuesday morning. Fast! Katie pointed out that Lulu had recently changed their cover material, which is pretty glossy and picks up lots of fingerprints. Also, I probably would have been better off using an image for my cover rather than choosing a solid-color background, since their printers use toner to match the color, which makes it a bit banded-looking. Despite that, I’m really impressed with how simple and inexpensive this was to do. I will definitely do it again.