Calendars on Lulu

[jeff_duntemann]

I'm heading off to Chicago later today to witness our new niece's baptism, but before I shut down I wanted to report on another Lulu publishing feature that I tested: Calendars. In addition to books, music, and other digital downloads, Lulu allows you to publish photo calendars as well. So to give it a roll I gathered twelve of my best QBit photos, and created a QBit 2007 calendar.

As with books, Lulu publishes calendars through a wizard that asks you questions, prompts you to upload your content (in this case, 12 high-res photos, with captions) and then crunches the material into a finished, printable PDF. You can then review the PDF, and order a printed copy (at cost) to see how it will look in physical form. I don't have the printed calendar yet (it will be waiting for us in Chicago) but the creation process is straightforward and the PDF looks very good.

You have the option of including any of a list of holidays and celestial events (basically, phases of the moon) as well as purely custom notices like family birthdays or the anniversary of Apollo 11's landing on the Moon.

Some minor quibbles:

• The photos should be of a 3:4 aspect ratio, which is how most cameras take them. Nothing in Lulu's doc mentions this; I found out when I cropped a few photos and found that they were clipped if they were too high, and left whitespace if they were too long and not high enough.
• Although they allow you to upload a single binary preview file, what the system really needs is a way to generate (on the server side) a single thumbnail of the 12 calendar photos. This is not rocket science, and I've sent them the suggestion. I haven't had the time to create the thumbnail file myself, but in truth readers of Contra will have seen most of the photos already.
• The calendars are expensive. Their base manufacturing cost is $19.95, and if you want to make a profit you must sell them for more than that. Color ink is not that hideously expensive to make, but the printer companies have clearly staked it out as their primary profit center.

Although I didn't intend to make the calendar public (we're giving them to family members for Christmas) I made it public anyway, and you can see it on my Lulu storefront. Overall, a very cool system, and I think it may be the first system ever to integrate custom calendar creation with a Web ordering and fulfillment system.