Your knowledge and ideas are the building blocks for the next generation, the foundation that ensures we continue to progress as a society. You need ever-better ways to share your knowledge and reach more people — and you deserve ever-better incentives to do so.

Lulu is working to open publishing to everyone, to create best-in-class tools so you can make just about anything and reach anyone. Whether you are an individual, publisher, educator, or enterprise — and whether you write technical manuals or romance novels — our goal is simple: to give you the most opportunities to share and profit from your remarkable ideas, knowledge and stories.

We are launching a significant initiative in the effort.

Beginning today, you will find more than 700,000 new titles in the Lulu Marketplace, titles as diverse as Harlan Coben’s Caught from the list of New York Times bestsellers to Blink by Malcolm Gladwell. This follows the addition of more than 200,000 traditionally published eBooks that we added in November. In the coming weeks, we’ll add more content through additional partnerships as we make Lulu.com the world’s premier destination for published knowledge, ideas and expression. In effect, we are creating the world’s biggest bookstore.

At the same time, we are creating new ways to discover the books, information, and knowledge you need from this massive bookstore.  We will be enabling millions of Web sites to earn more by offering their own bookstores to their communities.

Our goal is to give you the tools you need to reach your market.   Whether your target audience buys your books, or knowledge or services is, of course, up to the quality and usefulness of your work, as it is in any other free market.  But by expanding the Lulu Marketplace, and taking our marketplace to your readers, the goal is nothing less than to enable more buyers to discover your work.

Buyers should be rewarded.  The really motivating part of building Lulu over the last few years has been the remarkable works that are uniquely available on our virtual shelves — non-fiction books about science, commerce, art and history and novels that show the rich imaginations of creators from around the world.

To help buyers sort through their many options — and help you get noticed —the search engine on our site has been significantly upgraded and “Find” is now the most prominent element at the top of our revamped homepage. We continue to enhance our search function and will continue leveraging our weRead social discovery platform to foster even better connections between creators and buyers.

It’s an exciting time in this industry, this era of open publishing that is giving voice to a new breed of creator and empowering consumers with a new world of ideas. We know you have choice, and we appreciate that you’re with Lulu.  We know we have to offer you better tools and more innovative approaches to ensure you reach ever-larger markets, in order to have ever-greater opportunities to be rewarded.

This is a fun adventure as we, you and Lulu, re-invent publishing for the Internet age, and remember: we are not the publisher — you are. Thanks for your support and don’t hesitate to let me know what you think of what we are attempting to achieve.

Cheers, Bob.

The new Lulu 2008.4 release brought the usual amount of bug fixes, but the new feature released was a new search engine based on Solr. You don’t have to know what Solr is or why it’s important, but what you will notice is a new search box in the results displayed from your query that looks like this:

This new search box is contextual in nature, meaning that features are only displayed in response to your actions. This means you have a powerful arsenal of search options, but the screen isn’t cluttered with check boxes and drop-down menus. To try it out for yourself, just search for anything on Lulu. You’ll see the new search box at the top of your results.

In addition to the snazzy new interface, we made plenty of other changes that will help shoppers better find what they are looking for. Some of these improvements include:

• ability to search using accented characters (i.e.: à,è,ö,ñ)
  
• ability to filter results by user rating
  
• ability to filter results by publication date
• ability to filter results by language or country of the published work
• ability to search within a category (science fiction,
  romance, etc.)
• incremental indexing – this means projects are available for searching minutes after being published

Have you had a chance to see the new Lulu Search in action? Let us know what you think by commenting on this post.