By Allan Maurer

Bob Young, CEO Lulu.com

RESEARCH TRIANGLE, NC – Bob Young, founder and CEO of Lulu.com and co-founder of open source provider Red Hat says that changes are happening so rapidly in the publishing world that language itself puts constraints on how he can talk about them. For one thing, he says, “There is no such thing as a book.”

Young says that will be the theme of his talk at the third annual Internet Summit at the Raleigh Convention Center Nov. 17-18. Young is one of many top executives, entrepreneurs, and Internet gurus from Playboy, foursquare, Google, Yelp, salesforce.com and other top Internet venues slated to participate in the 2010 Summit.

Young, who cheerfully admits he loves good old fashioned dead tree books “with a passion” and even collects old dictionaries, says he thinks it will be a while yet before printed newspapers and books go the way of the dinosaur.

“I think there will be an ongoing role for the paper-based media. At the very least their role is to serve old geezers like me and I have to admit it’s painful at the age of 56 to refer to myself as an old geezer. But I much prefer to read a paper newspaper. It’s part of who I am to read a paper every day.”

Advertisers know that people like Young and others of his generation also have most of the disposable income in America and make most of the high end purchases such as a Mercedes, so they’ll continue to support printed media, he says.

Nevertheless, fundamental change is underway in the publishing industry, he says, and one change is our notion of just what a book is.

Books: a figment of our collective imagination

“Books,” says Young, “are a figment of our collective imagination. We need to reset what we previously thought of as books and think about them fundamentally differently and the industry is in the process of proving that.”

One area of the publishing industry changing quickly is in the e-reader space, Young notes. “Everyone keeps talking about these e-readers as if there is one that is going to replace the paper book,” he says. “There will not be one.”

Talking to e-book makers such as Sony, Amazon, Google and Apple with its iPad and analysts covering them,  Young says, “They all act as if there is some sort of ‘answer’ and all they have to do is discover what the ‘answer’ is and they’ll put everyone else out of business. In other words, they’re going to invent the next version of the book.”

Not so, says Young.

“My answer is, ‘hold on.’ Now that the book has been freed from paper, you have to focus on what the actual value of the particular content you are talking about. A dedicated reader is great for a John Grisham novel. I would argue that Amazon’s Kindle is a great reader for a novel.”

But it is far less useful for reading a text such as Economics 101, says Young. For that, as for news, a fully interactive device with links is much more effective.

E-readers certainly have their advantages. Amazon says it is now selling more books in Kindle versions than traditional hardcovers. We commented that we already have a bookshelf full of electronic volumes on the Wi-Fi Kindle we bought.

Take a library to the beach

Young points out that they’re growing in capacity and speed. “You’ll be able to take whole libraries with you to the beach,” he says. “You’ll be able to take more books with you to your lawn chair on holiday than exist in a Barnes & Noble store.” That, of course, poses problems for Barnes & Noble, because “Getting your hands on content is no longer the reason you go to a Barnes & Noble.”

But, says Young, all the first generation e-reader devices are “All trying to be the four-door sedan, the popular item in the market. You’ll see a couple of four-door sedans, but successful guys will build pickup trucks and dump trucks and family minivans. They’ll build a version that is really good for reading Economics 101 textbooks or reading newspapers or reading novels. You’ll have different readers for different content.”

They won’t all be dedicated readers, he says. “Some will be the iPhone you carry in your pocket. Some the browser on a computer. Some will be dedicated readers.”

Helping the author sell more books

Lulu.com, says Young, is focused on the same core mission it began with: to help authors make more money from their work. Publishers are still important in helping authors market and sell their work, although traditional publishers need to reevaluate their roles.

Lulu.com, Young says, is looking at creating tools to help authors market their books across a wider territory on the Internet. “We want them on Amazon, but it’s only one of tens of millions of markets that exist across the Internet that would benefit from your content. If you’ve written a book on the Lusitania, you want it on Amazon, but you also want it on all the marine history sites out there and that’s what Lulu.com is pushing toward.”

The firm already gives authors a much higher percentage of the money a ‘book’ makes than traditional publishers. One NC State author who has found quite a few faults with Lulu.com nevertheless continues to publish through the site. Young had coffee with her not too long ago and after listening to her litany of complaints, he asked her why she still stayed with the firm. She said she did make about $25,000 selling only 5,000 or 6,000 copies of her work. That’s far more than she would get from traditional publishers for that number of copies sold.

Young says he’s still working on his Internet Summit talk and is likely to rip it up and start  over a few times before the event itself.  “As you compose a talk you’re also in the market learning more and find new pieces of data, so you compose right up until the day you actually give it.”

One of the problems he faces right now as the publishing industry rapidly evolves, is coming up with new language to talk about that changing idea of the ‘book.’

His composition process must work fairly well. After his first Internet Summit talk a few years ago, people streaming out of his room gave him rave reviews for giving them useful insights.