Lulu.com books-on-demand site broken
Owen Thomas · 11/05/08 04:40PMYou would think an online print-on-demand bookstore would be able to print books on demand. But you'd be wrong! A reader reports that he wasn't able to finish checking out a book on Lulu, a print-on-demand startup. (Red Hat founder Bob Young, shown here, was inspired to start the company after he ended up with boxes of unsold copies of his Linux nonthriller, Under the Radar.) A customer-support rep said that the company had known about the ordering bug for a week, and might not fix it for another week. An online store which doesn't want its customers' money? Odd. The only possible conclusion: Lulu doesn't have enough actual customers to worry about letting them conduct business with the company. Here's the exchange with the support rep: