A pretty good comparison site of PODs
http://booksandtales.com/pod/index.php

new review site http://podpeep.blogspot.com/

> http://booksandtales.com/pod/index.php *Very* nice, especially if you click on the links. And thanks for the link to the review site too. What do you suppose this comment about Lulu means? "their direct printing costs are $3.00 more expensive than their external printing costs. . . . Their own printing costs are about $3.00 more expensive than that of books intended for external distribution, that may be seen as a way to artificially inflate the author's royalties ('officially' you get 80%, but they get an extra $3.00) and the author's discount (again, you pay your 'printing costs' but they still make a $3.00 profit)." I'm not getting what's meant here by direct printing costs and external printing costs.

I don;t quite follow it either. It's a good site but not totally relaible (Most people see Virtual Bookworm as a place to avoid)

Oh and I am one of the 3 POD People, though I would make sure I was not reviewing books by anyone I know. I mean for us to run a non-inflated 1-10 rating system.

I don't get what the site wrote about Lulu's 3$ more expensive inflated price either, and that quoted cost of 149$ is wrong. That's the "optional" cost of purchasing an international ISBN plus distribution service, which basically means you can sell through Amazon internationally, and a some other major online retailers that I forget the names of. It's purely optional. I bought the basic ISBN, 40$, for only two books, but only so that I could use the ISBN to promote the series through these two books, and to get it on Google Print, although Google Print has been really sucky and still hasn't put my books live. I've been waiting months. The other books don't have an ISBN yet. It doesn't matter so long as I can sell the ebooks through Lulu. I'm not interested in forking out loads of dough. The endeavour must pay for itself in the long run. Beans in. Beans out. I'm pragmatic that way.

I think they mean the per page cost is different if you take the distibution deal or not--which if it was a real per page cost would not occur -- e.g. its done to manipulate something like apparent profit to the author?

No idea if this is so, since I haven't really checked into the international package. But I do know that the costs go up for the royalty because bookstores like Amazon take a percent of the total sale, rather than a percent of the author's profit. So the author must up his so-called royalty to make any profit as well. It's more like a flat commision rate, if you ask me. If it were a true royalty, the author would get a percent of the total sale too.