Lulu Developer Blog

Last month I reviewed some of the exciting projects that Lulu is working on.  This month I want to focus on what you have been up to.  We released our first version of the publication API in the middle of 2010.  On January 13th, we have added the ability to track the number of books that each application has published.  I thought it would be fun to review how you all are doing:

In the second half of January, we had 8 applications publish 137 books.  Just over half of those books were published by just one application.  If we remove the books that were labelled as tests based on the titles, the rest of the applications published about the same number of books.  If we look at when the books were published, again, ignoring the 74 published by one application, the books were published at a rate averaging just over 4 per day.

But, that is only part of the good news.  If we look past the publications to which books have been purchased, the news is equally positive.  Of the 8 applications that published books, four applications had books purchased.  In fact, those four applications sold close to 15 books each.  Remember, we are tracking those books published between January 13th and January 28th, which also means that we are only tracking purchases in that time frame as well.

We are very excited to see our partners doing so well with our publication API.

I also wanted to give a quick update on our progress.  I have rewritten some of our documentation, not as much as I wanted, but I am continuing to work on this as time allows.  Please let me know what you think of the new authentication/authorization documentation.

We have two new APIs coming at the end of February:
    1)  Document Conversion - Today, you can bring us a PDF file.  At the end of February, you'll be able to bring PDF, Word documents, RTF,  or HTML.  We will convert the files to print-ready PDF and publish the book.
    2)  Order Fulfillment - This will be a limited release of an API to allow users to specify a list of orders for Lulu to fulfill.  The API user will be billed for these orders at the end of each month.

As these APIs are completed, I will post more information about how to get access to the APIs and how they work.  If you want your application mentioned in our application gallery, don't forget to let us know through api@lulu.com or by responding to any blog post.  You can also follow us on twitter now.

Ryan