Friday morning I was up early and knew I was going to go sit in the High School auditorium while my child wandered through the classrooms touring her new school and getting her new books for the year. I decided to purchase some downloadable books on Lulu to take with me to read while I was waiting.

I downloaded 3 informational type books from Lulu and printed them off and away we went. I sat down and started reading the books that I had put into a binder before leaving and much to my surprise the books had a ton of hyperlinks in them. Most of them were links to go get the information that SHOULD have been in the book. I read what I could and then thought I would put it away and wait until I got back to my computer to read the entire book and click the words that contained the hyperlinks. I had a chance to sit down this afternoon to look at some of the books (they are in a PDF format) and the links were all in blue, however I couldn’t click them.. they were non clickable links in a PDF document.

I thought maybe I need to upgrade my software.. I updated my PDF reader to see if that made a difference.. NOPE still didn’t work.

Off to call Lulu! What, no phone number? Okay looks like they have a live chat. I got on live chat with a rep and they told me to use Firefox to download the documents and see if that made a difference. I downloaded it using FF and still didn’t work.

I asked them to refund my money which then they told me they couldn’t refund my money because the documents have already been downloaded.

Now.. ONE of these books is only 9 pages long has a staggering 69 links! That is over 7 links a page that I am supposed to click on and check out what the author is talking about and can’t! The books are useless! I explained this to the support rep who then started sending me Lulu’s member agreement policy through the chat window-
“Support: Please note that Lulu is not a publisher, but instead provides users with tools to publish their own content. Because Lulu is not a publisher, we do not review work published through our site.
Support: Lulu accepts no responsibility for the quality of the content (including misspelled words, grammatical errors, etc.), its formatting, design or overall appearance. We provide a creator-controlled publishing tool, so the author approves the visual presentation and content of each item. Our staff does not monitor or check individual content prior to publication through our web site.”

Bottom Line is.. make sure you check the member agreement policy before you buy anything from anyone. I am waiting to hear back from Lulu regarding resolving the issue and will keep you all abreast at what happens.