Lauren: Hey, everyone. Welcome back to another episode of Publish & Prosper. I am super excited today to be in the studio with our CTO here at Lulu. This is Christoph Kepper, and he is visiting us from all the way across the pond. And we're very excited to have him here.

Christoph: Thank you Lauren.

Lauren: Thank you for joining me.

Christoph: Thank you. It's, it’s a pleasure to be here. It's my first podcast, so I'm a little nervous. Please forgive me for that. I'm based in Germany, where I live with my family and kids and... Yeah, I've been Lulu’s CTO now for almost – no, for over ten years. It's been quite a while. Yeah.

Lauren: Wow. How did you get to that place? How did you – Where did you get introduced to Lulu in the first place, even?

Christoph: Well, it's one of the most unusual and lucky moments of my life, I must say. I knew this, this printer in the Netherlands, Martijn. And at some point he introduced me to Lulu’s CTO. I had known Lulu for a very long time. Over twenty years right now. And it's always been an interesting company for me to, to check, because I've been involved with books for a very long time. So I met this CEO of Lulu who was based in England. And we talked for four hours, and afterwards he offered me a job.

Lauren: Wow.

Christoph: And that was, I think, a great risk that he took. And I'm, I'm glad that he did that. And I think it was good for both of us. It was also good for Lulu in the long term. And, yeah. I'm still very happy to be here.

Lauren: I would definitely agree that it's been good for Lulu in the long term. You've done some really, really cool things in the time that I've been here.

Christoph: Yeah.

Lauren: So that's, that's been incredible. What were you doing with books before that?

Christoph: A couple of friends and me, we worked with Wikipedia. And we created a software that allowed people to export their most preferred Wikipedia articles and print them as a book.

Lauren: Cool.

Christoph: And that was before smartphones. Before mobile data and anything. So it was actually pretty unusual at the time. And I've been working with the Wikimedia Foundation since 2007, and to this day. This company is called Pedia Press, 10% of all the revenues are donated to Wikipedia. And, I'm very happy about that partnership.

Lauren: Cool. That's awesome. You've kind of been doing this thing where you're innovating new ways to work with publishing and to bring information and books to people for a long time.

Christoph: Yeah. And, and that's actually what got me into books. I always liked books. I've studied design even, in the US for a year. And I always liked, you know, the print medium and liked doing books. And when we created this, these Wikipedia books, which are, by the way, the most obscure, unnecessary thing on the planet. And...but still, it was fun to do. And I learned a ton about publishing and what you needed to do. And basically, I think that was the right rite of passage for me to get to Lulu, because I already knew a lot about the issues. And yeah, the problems that you have to solve while running a publishing company, you know.

Lauren: Yeah. What did you study with design?

Christoph: I spent a year at the University of Miami.

Lauren: Okay.

Christoph: And in Germany, I studied a subject called media management that was actually geared towards TV and radio producers. But I always liked the internet, and I, you know, built the first website in 93, or something like that. So I'm really old, an old web guy, and I'd always build online applications and, yeah, web design also was a part of that. And I had the good fortune to be able to study one year in Miami. And I couldn't go for a degree, so I went to do all the things that I couldn't do as well in Germany. And I studied design and music and, you know, all the things that in Germany, I had no time for.

Lauren: Cool.

Christoph: One of the best years of my life, I can tell you that.

Lauren: Oh I’m sure, I'm sure. I think that's actually probably one of my favorite things about Lulu, and about the people that work here, is that everybody has different niche interests and areas of expertise that even if they, like... You know, like as our CTO and as somebody who leads our dev team and our IT department and all that kind of stuff, like, somebody might not stereotype you as being like, really into media or music or design or something. But the fact that you have that background in addition –

Christoph: Yeah.

Lauren: – to your technology experience, I think is what makes...like, makes you such a cool asset to this company and makes everybody here kind of bring different things to the table.

Christoph: Yeah, it's definitely an area where people come with, you know, a lot of diverse backgrounds and have all these amazing things that they have done in their lives. And it's great that Lulu is a place where these people can, you know, focus on one thing, but we're embracing all the other things. And I could never, you know, make a living from my music or from design work or whatever, you know, but it's good to have that background.

[6:01] - Evolving the Lulu Tech Stack

Lauren: Yeah, absolutely. So what is it that you actually do here? For the, for – I know what you do. For the listeners, what is it that you actually do? As either yourself or, you know, your team overall here at Lulu?

Christoph: Lulu is more or less a tech company. We, we create publishing technology. And I always wanted that. Because if you are at a random big corporation or a bank or, you know, a mobile phone carrier or whatever company, the web application that they have, or they might have numerous web applications, but that's not really what's driving the business. At Lulu what's driving the business is our website. Our website is our factory. It's how we – it's the service that we provide to our customers. It's what makes us our money and what's, it's what's driving revenue. And improving that and building a structure that is scalable and helpful is what I do on a day to day basis. And I have done that for numerous years. And my team is, is helping with this and the numerous aspects of that, you know. There are the people who create the new features on the website or the people who create an infrastructure that allows us to scale, in the holiday season when the traffic spikes and we have two times or three times as many users in a given month than in the slow season. It's important to be able to scale that technology and to create something that is able to survive over multiple years. And that's extendable. And that can be adjusted to newer needs or newer requirements. This has been key in redesigning our platform.

Lauren: Which is something that we've been doing... I started here in February of 2019, so I was here –

Christoph: Yeah.

Lauren: – about a year before the launch of 2.0.

Christoph: Yeah.

Lauren: So I was, I was here for the tail end of that production process and then the implementation of that.

Christoph: Yeah.

Lauren: So pretty much my whole time here, we've been working on the evolution of Lulu.

Christoph: Yeah.

Lauren: And you’ve spearheaded a lot of that.

Christoph: Yeah. I mean, Lulu was founded in 2002, started and launched in 2003. When I came on board, Lulu's tech stack was very diverse. Because the industry has evolved over that, you know, one and a half decades, to a great degree. And Lulu was using several different database technologies, programming languages, all kinds of things. And it was a huge ball of spaghetti, and nobody fully understood the system or knew how to make changes. And that was a huge problem. And at the time when I joined, microservices were an architectural concept that was all the rage. And it's a way to split the, the problem that you're solving the problem domain into several small services. And that's the architectural concept that I applied to Lulu – Or not me, you know, it's never just me. It was always a team, and that's one of the beautiful things here. But that's been the concept and we've started implementing that in 2017. So even before you joined, and built it out over several years. And we started with some experimental sites like Lulu xPress, which you might or might not remember.

Lauren: I was, I was here right at the end that, yeah.

Christoph: Yeah. But our print API was one of the earliest things that we created. And we, you know, we saw good success with these new technologies and with new ideas. And then in the 2019, up to 2020, we tried to relaunch Lulu.com and move away completely from that old technology stack into something that is much more coherent and much easier to manage. It was very stressful. I remember that I slept in my office several, you know, weeks I would say. But after three months we got over the biggest problems. We still had customers. People were ordering throughout all this time. And then things got gradually better and better. And we were able to stabilize the platform and to grow. And... Yeah, it's – Lulu has, had been always one of the biggest self-publishing platforms on the planet. And we were able to handle that scale and we were able to handle all the load from the, the users and to even grow it. And yeah, that's been, been going on, and our infrastructure costs are basically flat.

Lauren: Yeah.

Christoph: That's, that's a wonderful thing.

Lauren: Yeah.

Christoph: You know? That's, that's what you aim for, that you can grow the company, but not grow the infrastructure at the same time. And we are able to scale when we have a lot more traffic, but then it goes down again and our cost basically stays flat over that.

Lauren: And I mean, correct me if I'm wrong on this, but ultimately we would not have been able to build out so many of the things that we've done since then without doing that –

Christoph: Yes.

Lauren: – overhaul. Right?

Christoph: Absolutely, absolutely.

Lauren: Yeah.

Christoph: This is, this is key. That new architecture allows us to innovate and evolve the platform in ways that were simply impossible beforehand. And we have, and we still continue to do, and add new features, add new backend layers, you know, optimize our structure, optimize our tech stack, etc. So...

Lauren: Yes.

Christoph: This was absolutely worth it. Totally.

Lauren: Yeah, I think a lot of – I think a lot of people that are just everyday users of our platform probably don't realize how many back end pieces there are to it, and how many things that there are like, if we made public announcements every time there was some, we've implemented this new feature on the backend, they wouldn't even like, they wouldn't care, they wouldn't know what, what they're talking – But they would realize if it wasn't working.

Christoph: Right.

Lauren: Like, it's something that is making their day to day experience using Lulu easier, faster, better, whatever.

Christoph: Yeah.

Lauren: But they wouldn't even know what it meant if we were like, hey, we've introduced this new, like, ship-mapping system –

Christoph: Yeah.

Lauren: – or whatever.

Christoph: Yeah, of course there are some obvious big changes happening –

Lauren: Sure.

Christoph: – every once in a while, but every week we release somewhere between fifteen and forty-five new bug fixes, features, new...whatever, pieces of our platform. We've, I think, fixed over 10,000 bugs –

Lauren: Wow.

Christoph: – in the last five years –

Lauren: Wow.

Christoph: – on the new platform. And yeah, that's very, very helpful. And it's, it's humbling.

Lauren: Yeah.

Christoph: It's humbling to see how much effort it takes to create something that is really good. You know? It's, it's way beyond an idea. I always say ideas are cheap, you know? Because having a good idea is not a problem. Executing and getting it to that stage where it's really working well takes so much more effort.

Lauren: Yeah, wow. 

[13:34] - Creating Tech Solutions for Authors and Publishers

Lauren: We've talked about this in, in a couple of other episodes, where we've talked about like, sometimes we'll roll out new features and even we'll be surprised by how customers are using it. I’m trying to remember the specific example and I can't think of it off the top of my head, but there was something with the Order Import tool. When we launched the Order Import tool, we had all these ideas in mind for –

Christoph: Yeah.

Lauren: – how people could use it. And then some of the first few users that were using it, were using it for something we hadn't thought of.

Christoph: Yeah.

Lauren: And, and I remember seeing that being like, wow that's, that's cool. Like that’s –

Christoph: Yeah.

Lauren: – you know? There's, there's all these things we can think of on our end.

Christoph: Right.

Lauren: But that doesn't mean that someone else isn't going to try something totally different.

Christoph: The Order Import tool came out of an idea that I had, because remember those Wikipedia books? There is an organization called the Humble Bundle, and it's donating stuff to charity. And they wanted to donate to Wikipedia in one year. And they approached me to help them create a few books. And it was a book about the metal umlaut and, you know, fun topics in, in, where Wikipedia has a lot of information about that. Or the list of a dictionary of commonly misspelled words in the English language. And, you know, stuff like that.

Lauren: I want that book.

Christoph: And, so they had over 2,500 supporters for this fundraiser, and I had to send everybody the right book. And that was a huge pain, I can assure you. You know? Just – and I did it all manually and it all worked out. But this pain was something where I said, okay, probably other people have that pain too. And we created it basically for that case. And then suddenly there were people organizing conferences or, you know, family reunions or stuff like that, where they just had to send books to a number of people in a number of different locations. And it's great for that. It's, it's a simple tool. Just upload your spreadsheet, have it verified, and one-time payment, and you're done.

Lauren: You know, it's, it's so funny because I did not know that origin story. But the, the last episode that Matt and I recorded, the one that's going to come out before this one.

Christoph: Yeah.

Lauren: But obviously you could not have heard it yet because it's not out yet.

Christoph: Okay.

Lauren: Is about automating fulfillment, and how to know when you've reached that point where manual fulfillment is no longer a solution for you and it's time to start automating.

Christoph: Yeah.

Lauren: And here are the tools that, and systems that we have available to you that'll help you do that.

Christoph: Yeah.

Lauren: And we talked about the Order Import tool in that episode.

Christoph: Yeah.

Lauren: So it’s so perfectly coinciding there.

Christoph: Yeah.

Lauren: That that's a part of that. Are there other things that you've worked on here that have like, stemmed from we're trying to solve a problem.

Christoph: Well, yeah, I mean.

Lauren: I mean, obviously everything, right?

Christoph: A lot of that stuff like the, the, the print API was, was basically what I wanted. And in 2007 I worked with Ingram, or we worked with Ingram to, to create something that is now called a Lightning Source. And uses an API to upload the files, etc., and may have them produced. And – But it's not the latest technology that Ingram uses. And I thought there were a few things that we could do better. And so we did them at Lulu. And it's, you know, just – it's things like these where I have had exposure to, to certain problems and it's, it's best if you can scratch your own itch with these things.

Lauren: Yeah.

Christoph: And Lulu has this amazing community where we have scale that makes problems really good to solve. Like... one example: there are many more self-published books than traditionally published books. Last year I heard a number that traditional publishers, all of them, would publish about 400,000 titles. Lulu has published 350,000 titles. So from a scale perspective.

Lauren: Yeah.

Christoph: We are not that far away from what traditional publishers do. All of them. And that's something where we realized, okay, the stuff that we create is actually a tech stack that makes a lot of things a lot easier. So we, we’re dealing with a number of problems, like 350,000 books are 350,000 cover files and PDF files. And, you know, they come from all kinds of PDF generation tools, Word documents, etc. and they have a huge variety. But our printers, they need the same specs. And that's why we created a process that we call normalization, where we standardize all the PDFs that we get. Make sure that they have the same color profiles, the same dimensions, and that they create the least amount of problems at the printer. And this is something that we've been focusing on and has been key to our success. And increasingly, we are learning that the way we deal with certain problems is – because it's so lean and so efficient, it would also benefit other companies. And now some small publishers are using our services to publish their books, because it's just an easy way to get stuff out there.

[19:21] - Positioning Lulu as a Tech Company

Lauren: I want to come back to that, because I think that's a great, great segue into the next thing that I want to talk about. But first, I want to go back a little bit to kind of the running thread of all of this, which is this idea of Lulu as a tech company. Matt and I also just talked in an episode recently about our origin as Bob Young founded Lulu, as one of the –

Christoph: Yeah.

Lauren: – co-founders of Red Hat.

Christoph: Yeah.

Lauren: And we talked about the idea that, you know, Red Hat made their, their like, you know, landmark debut as a company that, that had this open source solution, that they believed in sharing their technology with anybody that, that had access and experience.

Christoph: Yeah.

Lauren: And, and then just kind of letting people see what they could do with it. And we talked about the idea that Lulu is kind of founded on that same principle that we make publishing and the technology of publishing accessible to anybody that has the know how to use it.

Christoph: Yeah.

Lauren: Do you think that like, as you're, as you're going through, like solving publishing problems, the fact that you're coming at it from a technology lens gives you a different angle.

Christoph: Yeah, for sure.

Lauren: Yeah.

Christoph: I mean that for me, I always think about how can I solve problems with technology so that I don't need as many people to do the work that the machine can do? I think people should do the work that only people can do and that, you know, is be creative. Write good stuff. Maybe this is changing with AI. That's a different topic, but.

Lauren: Yup.

Christoph: I think that we have so many quirky, wonderful, diverse, really smart authors here at Lulu and it's always fascinating to see what people write about. And this is really great. And, supporting these people is what is important. And in my conversations with Bob, he, he always said, you know, we have to be better at moving knowledge from one generation to the next. That's a phrase that he used quite frequently. And eliminate the barriers. Don't have an economic barrier, or don't have a knowledge barrier, or a technology barrier there. Technology must be easy to use. It must help the people. And I think that's what Lulu is about, you know? Is, is to... yeah, make it as easy as possible, and don't charge huge upfront fees or, you know, you have to become a member or something like that. If you want to use our services, yes, we're here. And we, you know, charge you for something. Okay, because we have to exist.

Lauren: Right.

Christoph: And we have to make a profit somehow. But, it should be based on the utility and on the benefit that you get out of that. And this is how we are structured. And this is why we don't have huge subscription fees or, you know... yeah, just huge barriers of entry, of any kind.

Lauren: Yeah. And also, I guess, why we're – not I guess, I know. Why so many of our innovations, whether they're backend or very public, are trying to make the whole process easier for everybody.

Christoph: Yes.

Lauren: Whether it's something like our Direct integrations, where we're trying to make it easier for people to sell their books however they can, or some other really cool features that I'm not going to reveal. But we've got some cool stuff in the works.

Christoph: Yes.

Lauren: I've seen some cool – I've been part of some cool beta testing recently that is going to be awesome, and I can't wait to get to talk about it.

Christoph: Yeah.

Lauren: When the time comes. But it's all with the goal of making it easier for the user and making it more accessible and, and less, like – just fewer barriers to entry.

Christoph: Right.

Lauren: Right.

Christoph: In technology, there's also this notion of pet and cattle. I'm not sure if you heard about that. It's…in the old days, people were treating their servers and their infrastructure, and – think about the computer you have at home. It's your pet. You have a specialized background on it, and you have organized everything so it fits you. And you treat it like a pet, you know? It has a name, it belongs to the family. At Lulu we treat our infrastructure and our services and basically also the books that we receive like cattle. We create a technical service that is putting everybody through the same process. When we publish a book, it really doesn't matter if we have a hundred books or a thousand books, because they all go through the same process. And the process is, is technically instrumented so that we don't need more people to do X or Y. And that's one of the criteria for a tech company. That, that we have a certain technology that does things, and we don't necessarily have people that need to support a certain customer to reach a certain goal. At least that's what we're aiming for.

Lauren: Right.

Christoph: You know, and we've succeeded to some degree in this area. And we are ever expanding to make that happen. Because that's the only way that you can scale efficiently. You know, that, that – yeah, you can provide a service that does also many things and just becomes ever better.

Lauren: Well, and that, that circles back to the idea of the file normalization and stuff too, right?

Christoph: Right.

Lauren: Where it's – it has to be a repeatable process whether you're creating one or a thousand, no matter what printer it's going to, what customer it's being shipped to.

Christoph: Yeah.

Lauren: It has to be a repeatable process.

Christoph: Right.

Lauren: And hopefully with as few hands involved in the process –

Christoph: Yeah.

Lauren: – as possible.

Christoph: And we have – I mean, this is always amazing to see, when people utilize technology on their end. We had customers who uploaded thousands of books to us. There was Michael Mandiberg, an artist who had actually printed the whole Wikipedia. 

Lauren: Oh yeah.

Christoph: And that was a thing, you know, five years back – or no, even longer back. And he uploaded all his books to Wikipedia with a script. Not to Wikipedia to Lulu with a script. Sorry. And that was super cool that he was able to do that. And you could order, you know, from this specific snapshot of Wikipedia, you could order any book there. And last year we had someone who created Sudokus with certain names. So if you're, you know, Lauren is your first name. There is a Sudoku book with your name.

Lauren: Fun.

Christoph: Uploaded 45,000 books. And. Okay, we saw, you know, a spike. Our stats were a little off for some time. But it's perfectly doable. It's not something that trips us off or that, you know, has a risk of, of disrupting our services.

Lauren: Yeah. 

[26:42] - The Evolution of Publishing

Lauren: Okay. So now to go back to where we're going from here. As we're building out – you know, because we're constantly building out new things, building out new systems, trying to stay involved and aware of what's going on. Not just in the publishing industry but also in the tech industry So where do you see... I guess publishing as a whole, evolving? And or Lulu evolving from here?

Christoph: Yeah. I mean. Publishing is changing all the time. I think the role of the printed book is also changing. I think the printed book will never go away, but we've seen the rise and decline of the ebook. Where, at some point around 2010, 2012, people were expecting the ebook to fully take over the printed book.

Lauren: Yup.

Christoph: And this has not materialized. The printed book is still a very powerful medium. But we see a slow decline thanks to new technologies, thanks to smartphones and tablets and all the other media that we use. So I think this is going to continue. And basically what we've done at Lulu is, is build a technology where… the process works.

Lauren: Yes.

Christoph: And we don't care how many books you sell. And traditional publishers are coming from a different angle. They, they have built their companies in a different age and they need to adapt to this new situations. And in many aspects, Lulu is already there. Because, you know, with the streamline processes that we just discussed and with automating a lot of the tasks around publishing. We are just much more efficient at preparing files for production. We don't need a manual staff or a manual preparation. And because we do print-on-demand, there's also a much lower risk at producing something. And there was a recent study by the International Publishing Association that identified print-on-demand as one of the key technologies in reducing CO2 emissions in the publishing industry. And, you know, becoming carbon neutral and just making sure that books are not shipped across the globe and back.

Lauren: Yeah.

Christoph: Is, is a key ingredient in reducing carbon – Yeah.

Lauren: Yeah. We've definitely, we've talked about this before too. The, the amount of waste in the traditional publishing industry.

Christoph: Yeah. And you know.

Lauren: It's shocking, I think, sometimes.

Christoph: When I joined it about 40% were pulped. The latest numbers that I've heard were that still about 25% of the books being produced are getting pulped. Which is way too much.

Lauren: Yeah.

Christoph: And, I think by the technology that's used to produce books is getting ever better. The printers are getting ever better. It's, it's very hard to distinguish even a POD-produced title from an offset title at this point. Of course, the manufacturing has so many more capabilities. If you are producing a bespoke book of any kind, and we're not quite there yet from a POD technology perspective. Or the technology is already there, but it doesn't always make economic sense to, you know, produce just one, quantity of one of some title. But that's where I think the whole industry is shifting a little bit, and everybody's interested in exploring more POD options. And it will become crucial also for us to create processes that support that. That you can, in a very flexible way, switch between offset and warehouse production and print-on-demand production, that is shipped directly to its final destination. Because ultimately that's the least environmental impact that you can have. You know, produce it once, just ship it to the final customer, and don't ship it back and forth between the bookstores and the warehouse, like it's done with traditional published books. Yeah.

Lauren: Yeah. I think it's going to be really interesting to kind of see that shift. I think that there's been a lot in, in even just in the time that I've been here at Lulu. I think that, you know, ten years ago, there was definitely a very common perception that traditional publishing was superior. Whether it was superior quality, superior books, superior content, it was, it was the old school way of doing things.

Christoph: Yeah.

Lauren: And, and self-publishing was people who weren't good enough for traditional publishing –

Christoph: Yeah.

Lauren: – did self-publishing. And I think that in, in the time since I've been here, and I swear I'm not biased just because I work here. But I think that in the time since I've been here, there has been a very like, escalated progress within the indie publishing industry, and indie publishers, and definitely Lulu. Where I think we've kind of reached a point where we've either caught up with traditional publishing or surpassed them, depending on what specific areas within that we're talking about.

Christoph: Yeah. I mean, it's – the work that a traditional publisher does is very different from the work that Lulu does.

Lauren: Yes.

Christoph: In almost every aspect. And I would not say that traditional publishers, you know, that what we do is better or on par. It's just different. It's – 

Lauren: Yeah.

Christoph: You know?

Lauren: That's a better way of putting it, you're right. Yes.

Christoph: It's – and we are good at some elements, and traditional publishers are good at other elements. When it comes to predicting the success of a title, I think we don't even try. And traditional publishers often fail. And so that's something where our approach has a lower risk of complete downfall, because our business model is sort of independent of the success of an individual title. But we have also seen some titles come to Lulu first, because they had so many rejections at traditional publishers, and become a huge success afterwards. 

Lauren: Yeah.

Christoph: And that's sometimes really incredible to to to see those stories, which books actually get on. And, traditional publishers have the benefit of a large history and a huge backlist that's supporting their economic activities. And that's great. That's, that's a wonderful thing. I think we live in this age of information abundance. Everything is available. And to me, I think all books should be available.

Lauren: Yeah.

Christoph: There's no reason why the great books of the 1960s or 70s are no longer in print. Everything should be in print all the time. If I'm interested in getting something I often, you know, from that age, I have to go to a library, which is also great. But if I want to own that thing, I go to used books. But there's really no reason why that should be the case. Everything could be in production all the time.

Lauren: Yeah. Yeah, maybe that's – I'm going to correct myself here, because I absolutely do not think that traditional publishing will ever be obsolete. I think there's always going to be a place for it in the industry and a need for it.

Christoph: Yeah.

Lauren: Especially with the elements of it that they provide that are, that are things that only people can do. So to all my friends listening that are editors and publicists and marketers in trad pub, I, I swear I'm not coming for your job. I think those are essential jobs to have.

Christoph: Yes.

Lauren: But those are also the things that we don't do. We don't do editing, we don't do marketing.

Christoph: Right.

Lauren: We don't do publicity. We're going to let other people do that stuff, and we'll provide the, the production and fulfillment and sales –

Christoph: Right.

Lauren: – elements of that. And I think that that's something that we're going to see more specialization between the two industries. Or the two halves of the same industry.

Christoph: Yeah. And I think that's where, also, the notion of Lulu being a tech company is valid, because we are much less of a publishing company than traditional publishing companies, or publishing companies at all.

Lauren: Right.

Christoph: We are just providing some infrastructure for authors, for publishers who – for whoever wants to use our services. And, this is a revelation that is relatively new for us. Because, you know, we thought about ourselves as a publishing company for such a long time, because that was the key activity. But actually, we're not. We're just making processes efficient.

Lauren: Yeah.

Christoph: And that's based on technology.

Lauren: Yeah. So we are a technology company that specializes in publishing books.

Christoph: Yeah.

Lauren: Or printing books.

Christoph: Or publishing infrastructure, you know? 

Lauren: Yeah. 

Christoph: We manage, I don't know, two million books? It's – the number is always...

Lauren: It's always astounding to me.

Christoph: It's, it's incredible. And, that's something that we can do very well. Or very scalable. And yeah, others might, might be able to use that as a service going forward.

Lauren: Yeah. Well, I'm excited to see where people go with this. I'm excited to see what – whether it's small business owners, authors, creators, enterprise companies, whatever it is, I'm excited to see what people start doing with the, the tools and technology that we have available.

Christoph: Yeah.

Lauren: Because I think that we're seeing a shift there. I think even in the last like two years, we've seen kind of a shift there of different creative ways people are using –

Christoph: Yeah.

Lauren: – Lulu or using books, and I'm excited to see where that keeps going.

Christoph: And there's also a shift in traditional publishers.

Lauren: Yes.

Christoph: That's…people treat us differently, talk to us differently, because they see the benefit that we could bring to their operation. And...yeah.

Lauren: Yeah. I think it's going to be cool.

Christoph: Definitely.

[37:38] - Blue Sky Publishing Technology 

Lauren: Is there anything – no spoilers, but is there anything that you're like, oh, this would be really cool to, or I think it would be really fun if we were able to create something, a tool that did this, or something?

Christoph: Right now Lulu supports around 3,000 some hundred different types of books. But of course, the world is much larger. I recently compared the number of trim sizes that Lulu supports – sixteen – and I did a research project with one of our printers, and they support 980. Just the trim sizes. And you can multiply this with the different papers and the different printing options, etc.. So it's very clear to me that we can never support all the trim sizes. It doesn't make any sense for us, as Lulu. But we can accommodate different trim sizes. And we came up with a concept to just describe those different production options. And I can foresee a future where we are routing orders to different printers that are not printing for us on a regular basis, but they are able to produce the book that the customer wants. And we are just routing the books to them, and they produce them. Right now, as a publisher, you have to build all the connections to your printer on a one-to-one basis. And we, as Lulu, we could add, act as a hub, where you connect to Lulu once, and then any printer that you'd like to use, you can just send the order to them.

Lauren: Cool. Well, I think that's interesting information, even if it, if it turns out to be something that –

Christoph: Yeah.

Lauren: – isn't quite doable. Because I think even then just knowing, like realizing just how many different books sizes and trim sizes and things like that.

Christoph: Yeah.

Lauren: I think there's so much that kind of stuff where people are like... Oh, I don't, I don't realize like, oh, why doesn't Lulu have this size book or whatever?

Christoph: Yeah.

Lauren: We literally we can't have every single –

Christoph: Right, and –

Lauren: – possible. There are so many possible –

Christoph: And there are also many, you know, why do these trim sizes even exist? And there are reasons for it that are... Okay, I want my book to be a little larger in the bookshelf or in the bookstore, so that people can grab it more easily. Or I want it to be a little smaller. Or there is the imperial and metric difference.

Lauren: Oh yeah.

Christoph: Where there are metric traditions for book size, and there are imperial traditions for book sizes. And yeah, this is, you know, everything adds a little something and you have those differentiation arguments. You say yeah, I don't want to have that same size, because all my competitors have that size, and I want my book to stand out just a little bit. And this is where all the different trim sizes come from.

Lauren: Yeah.

Christoph: It's a very varied world and with a lot of, you know, different things. And we can't be everything to anybody.

Lauren: Yeah, we can try.

Christoph: We can try. We will.

[40:41] - Episode Wrap Up

Lauren: Alright. Last question and then I will, I will let you go. If you were going to publish your own book, what kind of book would you publish?

Christoph: I think a book about the journey.

Lauren: Yeah?

Christoph: About Lulu's journey, and my journey with this... would be an interesting story.

Lauren: So like memoir or more like, retrospective on the company and your involvement in it?

Christoph: Well, I think a mixture between the tech aspects, and the, my personal experience with that. It's very hard to differentiate the person from the stuff that they're building. 

Lauren: Yeah

Christoph: There's always this, you know, it's called Conway's Law, for example, that an organizational structure is always represented in the software. And there are some of those aspects that really you have to understand the background in order to fully understand why a certain tech was built in a certain way. Yeah. So it goes together.

Lauren: Yeah. Wow, I love that. That you can't separate the person from, from what they're building. And I think that's something – I think that's a great note to end this on, because I think that's something that anybody listening, whether they have written one book or they've launched a whole business, can relate to that.

Christoph: Yeah.

Lauren: That this is something that you don't do for... I mean, not just for the money. Everybody does something for the money, but. But the people that we are speaking to, and the people that we work with at Lulu, whether it's our, our customers or our coworkers, are people that are passionate about what they're creating. And, and that is – I think that's a fundamental truth of that. Is that you cannot separate the person and their passion and their beliefs in what they're doing –

Christoph: Right.

Lauren: – from the thing they are building. Whether it's tech solutions or a book or a business or whatever.

Christoph: Right. And this is also... you know. In the age of AI, this disruption is coming, but we still need people.

Lauren: Yes.

Christoph: We still need the author. And I love Lulu because of this embracing of the author, wherever they come from, whatever they do, this is the place –

Lauren: Yeah.

Christoph: – where they can express themselves.

Lauren: Love it. Well, thank you so much for joining me today.

Christoph: You're welcome.

Lauren: That was –

Christoph: My pleasure.

Lauren: That was delightful. And I hope everybody listening enjoyed it, because I think there was a lot of really great stuff in there.

Christoph: Cool.

Lauren: And I hope it was a fun lesson –

Christoph: Yes.

Lauren: – for everybody. Hopefully we're going to do more series, or more episodes like this. I'd love to do kind of a series where I sit down with different people, and Matt sits down with different people, in the company. So it's not just the two of us –

Christoph: Yeah.

Lauren: – yapping all the time. So if anybody listening has any questions or is really interested in like, I'd love to know more about this element of the internal part of a publishing company or not a publishing company, a technology company... let me know. Let us know. You can comment on any of Lulu's social media channels. You can leave us reviews on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and comments on YouTube. You can email us at podcast@lulu.com and get in touch with us. So thank you for listening. Thank you again for joining me. It was a lot of fun.

Christoph: Thanks for having me.

Lauren: And we'll be back next week with another new episode. Thanks for tuning in.