More Lulu. I just showed the sample Lulu book to a political science teacher and mentioned the low cost, and he instantly began to think about the undergraduate political science journal he had been wanting to start on his campus.

Then I started thinking about teaching uses. I sometimes ask students to leave their advice for the students taking the course the next semester, but that's just a couple of pages -- not a book project. However, what if this semester's students wrote a manual on some portion of the course content, and next semester's students revised that section and added another, and the following semester a new group contributed and edited? Over time, you'd have a student and faculty-written textbook or course supplement, which could have local and regional examples and could be updated to include current events far more quickly than the three or four year revision cycle common to textbooks.

If you wanted to, you could handle each new stage of writing and revising on a class wiki. (Of course someone might ask why you'd bother to print the book if you had the wiki, but as dynamic as the web is I still don't think books are going away. Books and web sites have different strengths.) [0 & P]

Trying Lulu. As an experiment, I thought I'd try out Lulu, an online book publishing site. I put together a word processing file containing 56 radio essays by one of the other writers in the weekly Michiana Chronicles series here in Elkhart / South Bend, Indiana. I thinkered with layout for a bit, made a quick table of contents, then had Lulu make the pdf file. (If I had been on another computer, I could have done that myself.) I chose one of the stock color covers but passed on getting an ISBN number and other commercial extras. The thing was 132 pages long in easy to read type -- it could have been made shorter in a smaller font.

I ordered two copies, submitting the project on the weekend. The small package arrived on Thursday, looking just fine. One can see that I need to think more about page layout, and the whole thing needs a close proofreading, but it looks nice and feels just like any paperback book.

The economics are interesting for schools to think about. If a class of 30 students create a 6 x 9 inch paperback book of 150 pages -- each student contributing 5 polished pages of text, say, about community history or green living or whatever -- here are some ways the budget could go, according to the site's price calculator:

Copies for participants only
32 copies (one for the teacher, one for the school library, one for each student)
$ 7.06 manufacturing cost per book / approx. $ 0.35 to $ 1.00 shipping per book*

Copies for participants, family, and friends
152 copies (teacher, library, students, four friends or family members each)
$ 5.55 manufacturing cost per book / approx. $ 0.35 to $ 1.00 shipping per book*

Copies for participants and wider sales
252 copies (teacher, library, students, community sales)
$ 5.25 manufacturing cost per book / approx. $ 0.35 to $ 1.00 shipping per book*
You could also sell the book for a small profit, for fundraising.

*Shipping estimates depend on how quickly you need the books and on buying them all at once. If you or customers buy the books one or two at a time, the shipping ranges from about $ 2.00 to $ 8.00 or more per book, which changes the economics quite a bit. If you have customers buy directly from Lulu, you can also charge a royalty, but the company takes a 20% fee from that royalty. [0 & P]

An "About" page. I see that Chocolate & Zucchini, one of the leading food blogs, has a good example of an "About" page (or FAQ) that explains Clotilde Dusoulier's project and answers a number of likely questions about the site. Many of us would probably benefit from distilling the goals of our project into a page like this, and our students might learn from trying the same thing. [0 & P]