I’ve just stumbled upon Lulu.com, a website allowing creatives to publish books, calendars, comics, music and software without any technical knowledge and with no minimum print run. The idea is very simple and the breadth of products available is great combined with the ability to print one-off copies of your work.
But for a site with such a creative audience, many features could have been more intuitively designed. The site is screaming to be Web 2.0, and while they have obviously tried to mimic Amazon they have missed the boat on many pages. The ‘Browse > All Categories‘ page shows a nested list so narrow it’s unreadable (even on 1280×960), and the next page links on the bottom of the product pages just don’t work.
All I can think is what a great idea this could be – imagine if 9rules published printed article anthologies at, say, $12 per 100 page tome?