It’s an on-demand world. Just ask Lulu.

In today’s highly networked and increasingly modular environment, on-demand services and products are no longer a luxury.

You want to customize your own Nike sneakers? No problem. Go to NikeIDwhere you can customize your shoes (albeit with a finite, but large, number of options). Your individual choices will automatically be communicated to the production facility in Asia which has been upgraded to be able to produce pair after pair of customized shoes that can be shipped directly to their buyers. And all for the same (or slightly higher) cost as a mass produced pair of shoes.

This is the reversal of that other Industrial Revolution effect: mass production. But more on that on another day.

A company I discovered this week that does on-demand services and products in publishing is Lulu. The world of publishing has long been dominated by the publishers. They decide what should get published and how much of each product should be published. Consequently, they also control the marketing, pricing, and all other traditional processes for bringing a published product to the market. And the product can be books, music, movies, you name it.

Why is that? Well, there has never been an easy way for the content producers (writers, musicians, film makers) to publish their material on-demand (i.e., only for the number of customers that want to buy it). Partly because they couldn’t know what the demand was unless they first published the product and then saw how many customers bought it. And the physical publishers themselves needed to capitalize on economies of scale, so they would only publish a minimum number of product copies.

Today we have solved both problems. Publishing technology is flexible, digital, and modularized so it can publish one or one million products without a difference in cost. In the case of books, imagine the difference of printing a book that had to be manually typesetted and printing one that is in digital format that can be easily sent to the printer’s digital storage. And if your product is available first in digital format, then you can figure out the demand for it before you actually physically publish it.

Lulu does exactly that. A customer can publish any product (book, music CD, images, and so on) for free. Yes, for free! Basically, the customer uploads the content on Lulu’s servers and then waits to see if someone buys the product. Each time someone buys the product, one copy is published and shipped. Lulu only gets paid a commission if a product is sold.

 Lulu’s founders were also smart to realize that once you provide the basic service for free, you can increase your revenue source through value-added services. And they provide some of those, including a number of author marketing tools. They also know that if they help budding authors sell their books, they’ll make more money. So, they’ve created a marketplace on their site for third party services, such as editing, proofreading, translation, etc.

The question of course remains: if Joe Blow publishes his self-described masterpiece on Lulu, will anyone buy it?

Does it matter? Lulu makes money even if only a single copy is sold. Don’t you think Joe Blow will buy at least one copy himself to show off to everyone?

Electronic paper is great but don’t take my books away.

The idea of electronic paper and ink has largely existed in science fiction books and movies but it is close to becoming reality. According to a story on Yahoo! News, E Ink (a company that specializes in electronic paper technology) “holds more than 100 patents on its “electrophoretic” ink technology in which electric charges are sent along a grid embedded in the paper that cause tiny black and white particles to move up and down, creating text and images.”

One of the more obvious applications for such a technology is in the area of ebooks. Right now, ebooks are not very popular largely because they must be read on a screen  of a portable device. That screen is inflexible as well as hard to read under varied lighting conditions. Not to mention that it’s really tiring on the eyes. With electronic paper and ink, one could have what looks like a real book with real paper but which can be plugged into a computer, download the contents of an ebook, and change the display on each page to show the downloaded ebook.

This sounds great and very environmentally friendly. But the idea of having only a single book (or just a few), that can change its content on demand is horrifying to me. I am the type of bibliophile that loves to have his books around. It’s very hard for me to throw out or even give away my books and I am very proud of the book collection I’ve amassed over the years, something that makes each move more difficult. So, because of people like me, there will always be a market for plain old paper books. At least for another generation or two. I can imagine that children that grow up in a world where electronic paper is the norm never grow attached to the physical object of a book like I have.

Now when it comes to magazines, I would welcome electronic paper with open arms. It pains me every time I throw out yet another magazine when I think of the paper wasted on it (yes, I recycle, but still…). So I would love to have an e-paper magazine that would change content continuously.

Then again, I know a few people who are attached to their magazines the way I am to my books, and who rarely throw them out.