Pricing of GRBPIlion on Lulu.com

Shawn Graham of Electric Archaeology has published a collection of his blog posts on Lulu.com, the same Print-on-Demand service we use for GRBPIlion. This is cool.

I am also reminded by his post to be explicit about the pricing for the Ilion volume. Specifically, the current $21.03 cost is the minimum charge Lulu sets for printing and binding. Any amount above this would be split 80/20 between me and them. I will admit to guessing that even for $21.03, somebody - perhaps Lulu, perhaps the printer they use - is retaining at least a portion of the money, but I'm not bothered by that. All I know is that neither I nor Project Troia gets any revenue so that it's fair to say that we're trying to keep reader costs as low as possible.

This follows in the great tradition of scholars giving away their research for essentially no direct commercial gain. That's what happens when you sign over copyright to a journal for some minimal payment, often in the form of offprints. Academic books aren't usually money makers for their authors either. With Lulu, it is possible to be explicit about such economic factors and so drive hidden overhead out of the publication process.