 Hello there, I'm Luke Smith, and I have a YouTube channel which means that if a company wrongs me I can publicly complain about it, and maybe they'll actually do something about it. That's what this video is on. I have two goals in this, okay? I want to talk about this company Lulu and how they have been nothing but frustration for me. And secondly, if someone has an alternative to using their- and I guess if they want to fix this I hope they do. I would like to work with them, but the second reason I'm doing this video is if they don't, maybe someone else has an offer or has an idea. So here's the deal. If you watch my channel actually maybe around a year or so ago I did a video saying that I'm gonna start a little project, and I've been working on it sort of on the back burner for a while probably around a year or so, where I want to reprint out-of-print books, okay? There are many companies that actually do this online, but they do it really crappily. There are a lot of them. They'll basically just copy and paste, you know let's say a book from the internet that's in the public domain and reprint it. Terribly formatted. If it's in another language it'll be like mutilated because the people copying and pasting it, they don't, you know, they don't know. So I wanted, you know, obviously, I know how to typeset in law tech and stuff like that. So I wanted to make nice little books like this that they're just easy to read, reprinted stuff that I could have with a print-on-demand company and sell to people. Now originally, I just wanted it for myself on one of those. I don't believe in ebooks. I don't believe in reading stuff on a screen. I can't do that. I need to have a physical book otherwise it's just not real, okay? So I wanted it for myself and I figure hey, if I'm already doing this for myself I might as well sell it to other people. So that's what I've been sort of, again I had this idea maybe a year or so ago and I was working on it on the back burner, but the past couple of months I've really been trying to finish it off like put a lot of more effort into it. So I chose to use this company Lulu, okay? And I will have to say they are a print-on-demand company, so you can send them your book. I mean, it's sort of like Amazon does this. You guys might know this. I'm not gonna use Amazon because they're evil. But Lulu is one of these many companies that if you have a finished book or even an unfinished book that's not typeset, they can typeset it for you. But if you know how to typeset, you know, I send in a PDF in law tech all nicely formatted, design a cover, and they will just print the book, okay? And you can get pretty good margins compared to traditional publishing considering you don't really have like the upkeep cost of having the machinery to print things or something. So here's the deal. These are all the books that I've gotten from them. Test books. I will order one after the other. Sometimes I'm correcting my own problems. Like for example, here's Marcus Aurelius's meditations. I realized the first time I got this, it's way too centered inside, so that's my fault. I just had to move it and you know move the margins out, so it's a little bit more readable. But here's the thing. Very quickly, I realized that Lulu just had, must have either terrible quality control or something systematically wrong with a bunch of different things. So I got this. This is another fantastic book that you should unironically read when I am successfully finished publishing this. This is Isidore of Seville's etymologies. It's actually sort of a proto encyclopedia all in Latin, but here's the issue. I got this thing. In general, I realized the text is too big, so I shrunk it down on the next edition. But Lulu printed this thing and every fourth page is totally blank, okay? And I opened a ticket about this and I got some lady who obviously didn't couldn't take it. I think she assumed that I did not compile a PDF correctly or something like that or is an error on my side. Additionally, one minor error on this. I don't know if it shows up in this one. There is also, no, it doesn't show up on this one, but on other editions of this book I got, there's a point where I am supposed to have a little QR code, okay? I have a little QR code at the beginning of every single book. That is a link to, I actually know it's like a donation address. It's like a Bitcoin donation address. But as I got more versions of this book, only the hardbacks. On all the paperbacks, the QR code worked. But on the hardbacks, for whatever reason, the QR code never shows up, okay? And she was trying to convince me that it was my problem. I mean, I don't want to be mean. It's sort of like, I mean, she was giving me directions for like Adobe Reader or something stupid like that. I don't know how to, like there's a point when you have a support ticket. There needs to be a button to be like, yes, I know this is, I know what I'm doing. Could you please like elevate my ticket? That's what, some companies are good on that, some aren't. So anyway, this book, every fourth page is blank. And this is the second book I get. And I'm like, you know what? Maybe I got like a one out of a hundred, one out of a thousand, one out of a million error. So I actually got some more books and I, you know, other books that I was about to test. So here is a collection of paper and cyclicals. This one actually ended up pretty much fine, okay? It does have the QR code, I think, where is it? Okay, the QR code shows up. Oh, and I should be clear on this book where the QR code does not show up, it does have images inside that work fine. And the QR code is just an image, okay? So that's all I know about that. So, and the whole point of PDFs is not, I mean, the whole point of a PDF is your system should be printing it the exact way it shows up. That's what a PDF is supposed to be. But anyway. So another one here, books of Enoch and the book of Jubilees. Everything worked out pretty much fine here. But here's here's what ended up, okay? So once I had all these, I guess, printing examples, I sort of thought, oh, well, you know, when I got this one with one fourth of it being blank, that's probably just like a fluke. It's probably not my fault, not their fault. I mean, it's their fault, but it's like, okay, you're gonna have that happen. And I haven't gotten a refund for that. I did complain about that. But lastly, here's what happened. I hooked up Lulu. Now on my site, I'm going to have Lulu and like this application called Shopify that are synced together. So I don't have to, like they don't actually publish all their API stuff. So I basically have to use this junkie proprietary system so I can automate fulfilling orders. So I don't have to manually do everything. So I hooked that up just to see what would happen. And I ordered another copy of meditations and etymologies because those were pretty much done. Now the copy of etymologies ended up mostly fine. It didn't have all the blank pages, but it also did not have the QR code that it's supposed to have. Where is it? Where is it? Somewhere around here. Oh, no, this is the old one. Oh, anyway, it has it. I'm not gonna go looking through it. But here's the thing. I got the copy of meditations. Look at that. I send in the same PDF and it's not even centered. But more importantly, this isn't even my book. This is not even the book that I made. This is not the PDF that I made. It's some other book, Hammer of the Patriot. This, I actually looked through this text. It's highly based at Redpilled by Charles Chappell in 2014. This is not my book. They printed some other PDF and sent me it with my cover, okay? Now, here's my issue. I ordered, what, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine books. Two of them had errors like this one and the one with the blank pages. Two of them had errors that are like you can't overlook. Make the books totally useless. And then systematically, there was something wrong with the hardcovers. They don't show the QR codes, okay? So that's all I know. I have, and I want to be clear, every time I order one of these, I have to pay, okay? So I have paid, I don't know, maybe a couple hundred dollars getting the, I mean, maybe not that much. Maybe maybe a hundred fifty or something like that. Getting these books printed and it's the most annoying process. I want to be totally clear about that because you, it, and I'm not saying this is a bad thing. Lulu takes a little bit of time to print. Obviously, you know, they're not pre-printing stuff. It's print on demand. So it takes a little time to print and ship. So I think the longest it's been, maybe is three weeks. Maybe that's the longest it's been. But it's been such a frustration getting this book, getting a book that's broken due to a fault that is none of my own, and then getting sort of, you know, dismissed as an issue. Oh, it's your fault. You know, it'll work fine. Maybe we'll give you a refund. And then I have to wait three more weeks to see, oh wait, I was, I submitted the same thing and it just worked. And three more weeks to test it again. That is annoying. It's, wait, it's wasting my money, but it's more importantly wasting my time. I wanted to have this done in late February. Maybe before that. And it's just been a huge waste of my time and a bunch of frustration because this is beyond my control. Like, here's, here's a nice thing you should do, Lulu. Just open the book before you send it. Because if it looks like this, it's wrong. Look at the title page. Is that the set? That's not, that's not this, okay? So I don't know. There must be no quality control whatsoever at Lulu. And I understand that. If it's all, you know, automated, if you're, if you're whatever, but I just, like, there has to be something, it is so annoying. Like, let's, let me put it this way. Let's say I go public with my site, okay? Today. Seriously. And I'm selling things to people. What if two out of every nine of the books that I still let send out have a crippling error that make them impossible to read? Or you just get the wrong book? What am I supposed to do? What, how, like, how humiliating would that be? And of course, I could do the thing where I said, well, it's not, I mean, this all probably have to do this, is say, talk to Lulu about it. It's their fault. And if they're just, like, it is not even in their interest to be this bad. You know, there, there are some corners you got to cut, but if you actually have a lot of people who need this service, it is just going to be a frustration if you don't fix it now. Okay, that's, that's all I have to say. So that is my frustration. So here's my position. I might still use Lulu. Maybe, maybe I just got to one in a million errors or something like that. Maybe this rarely never happens. I was just supremely unlucky. Maybe that's it. Okay, that's a possibility. But I don't think that is how it is. But I mean, if that is how it is, if it's just a totally rare thing, maybe I will just go public and start selling books and tell people to talk to Lulu if they have an error. But that is a big frustration. And I think it's a dishonor to me, frankly. I don't want my reputation tarnished if I'm selling books through this company that is going to have terrible quality control. So that is one thing. And I will say the Shopify Lulu, you know, interaction is terrible. The system, let's see, there are a million things about it. Okay, this is just for the Lulu people. Actually, no, I'll say this afterwards. Let me go ahead and say the other thing I want to say. So if any of you guys out there have a better system for doing this, I don't want to spend a spend a million dollars to put some of these books up. You know, some of these books are very obscure. They're in, you know, here's one of Roger Bacon's works written in Latin. I wanted it. So I'm gonna print it. I don't know if anyone else wants it. So I don't want to pay a bunch of, you know, sunk, not sunk costs, fixed costs in a company. I want to do print on demand. But I don't, I feel like all the options I look into have been pretty bad. So I don't know if anyone else, I don't know, maybe run a publisher and you want to, you're interested in something like this. Because I actually have a lot of stuff right now that I could submit to this. So if you have a better way of doing that, please tell me. I've looked into Lulu and IngramSpark and all, most of these companies. And for one reason or the other, they're bad. Now, if you're a Lulu person, what was I just about to say about Shopify and how terrible it is? Or like how they don't interact. Yeah, the system is just messy and buggy. And the biggest annoyance is in order to print these books. So here's the thing. On the Lulu site, when you create a book, they automatically generate an ISBN. I want to have ISBNs in my books, okay? That makes them real. That makes them real official books in some system, right? So I want to have ISBNs. And also the Lulu site allows you to auto-generate a cover. Now, eventually, I want to make the covers all myself because I don't really like these covers. But my first gripe about that is there are stupid things about it. Firstly, the backs look terrible. And you can also not make multiple paragraphs on the backs. Their system can't handle if you return. It just prints a square or something stupid like that. So that sucks. But also, you can create a product on Lulu, but the Shopify app doesn't actually link to those products on Lulu. You have to recreate them on the Shopify app, putting in the exact same thing. It's set for you cannot get the free ISBNs and you cannot generate a cover using that system. So what I have to do is I have to create them on Lulu and then get the cover from that and the ISBN from that and then put them on Shopify. Again, redo the same process. Yeah, it's so stupid. I don't know. Do people actually use Lulu? That's my question. I don't know. Maybe my project is too big. I'm not trying to do some book that I wrote that no one's going to read. I want to actually print books and sell them to people at a larger scale. So maybe I'm doing the wrong thing. So if you know a company that does this better, please tell me. If you're in Lulu and you want to tell me that it's all a big mistake and something like that, and here's why this all went wrong, you can tell me that. But I don't know. I'm just a little frustrated. I just want to get this over. I don't want to have to think about this. The reason of using print on demand is so that I don't have to think about fulfilling orders. And I don't want to sit around thinking, oh, no, what if they send all of these erroneous copies to people? These are stupid. Anyway, that's all I have to complain about.