I had a conversation recently with the person responsible for Acquisitions at the National Gallery of Canada Library and Archives. She wanted to buy 3 copies of Picturesque Views of the Quartier for their collection. However, when she followed the links to purchase through lulu.com, there was a screen asking her to sign up for a binding legal Membership Agreement. Not only is she reticent to sign up as an individual for this legally binding agreement on behalf of her institution, but the online ordering system conflicts with the systems of acquisitions that the institution has set up for ordering publications (primarily from traditional dealers). As print-on-demand and “creator driven” online services seems to be the direction in which many artists and small publishers are moving, it will be interesting to see whether the institutions that collect them will be able to adjust their modes of working.
While one could be tempted to attribute her reticence to a generational opposition to online practices, this would be a misleading assumption. It is not that she is opposed to ordering online due to a discomfort with technological change. She purchases regularly through sites that do not require purchasers to sign legally binding membership agreements or to provide personal data on behalf of an institution that will “retain any of your Personal Data only for so long as is reasonably required to fulfill the purposes for which it was collected.”
There is little reason why lulu.com needs to gather the personal membership information from purchasers other than for the purpose of datamining. On other sites (such as abebooks.com) membership is an option for purchasers rather than a requirement. The lulu.com model of ecommerce positions purchasing as a service, “a service to enable Users to publish, and other people to purchase, digital content in on-line,” In this way, the company capitalizes of off both ends of the transaction through hidden fees associated with it (shipping) and datamining “to conduct research, to contact you, to contact those who purchase your Content (if you have selected to use the Lulu Thank You Note program) and to improve Lulu services,” as a potential method of monetization of a “free” service.
The end result of this transaction is that I will order the books for her on my creator’s account at lulu (they already have my data, but then they are also providing me with a service of POD publishing). I will ship them to the NGC and then I will invoice them separately, likely including a premium for my time.
The end conclusion? They would rather pay the creator more money than give lulu the data in exchange for a “free” service.
