Lulu Developer Portal

Important Update

Thank you for your interest in our API Program. Over the last two years, we have made significant investments into building our APIs and making them useful to third-party developers. Unfortunately, they have not achieved the adoption which we had anticipated and we will no longer be accepting new developers.

Welcome to the Lulu Developer Portal

Lulu's industry-leading open publishing platform is now freely accessible to innovative and enterprising developers! By providing a powerful set of APIs for publishing, we aim to enable partners to build new applications and add value to their businesses. Use of our APIs requires acceptance of the Terms of Use.

Getting Started

Follow these steps to start using the Lulu APIs today:

Browse the documentation.

Sign up for a free developer account. This account is separate from any Lulu account you may have.

Apply for an API key.

Check out samples in our App Gallery.

Join the discussions in the developer forum.

Follow luluapi on twitter.

About the Lulu APIs

Lulu currently offers the following APIs:

• Lulu Publication API

  The Lulu Publication API allows individuals and publishers to use the Lulu backend to publish print-on-demand and electronic books programatically. Upload and publish books in any format (paperback, hardcover, eBook), get free ISBNs (or assign your own), sell on Lulu.com, Apple's iBookstore, and other leading retail channels. The API works via a REST+JSON interface and an example REST client library in Python is provided.

Limits

We’ve placed limits on the free Lulu APIs, so that we can manage demand and performance. If you have questions, please post in the forums.

• Lulu Publication API

  Maximum of 10 calls per second and 5,000 calls per day per Publication API key.

Tips and Guidelines

To provide a great user experience and maximize the value of your offering, we recommend you follow some simple guidelines:

• Respect privacy:

  Treat your users' personal information as if it were your own.

• Be transparent:

  Always announce which information your application stores and shares with other sites and services.

• Avoid soliciting:

  Only ask users to supply information your application requires. Clearly state the benefits they will derive from disclosing personal data.

• Deliver value:

  Focus on delivering real-world value and not spam and me-too sites

• Focus on innovation:

  Innovation is the key. Provide features and tools users can't get anywhere else.

• Avoid offensive content:

  Do not facilitate or encourage the publishing of links to malicious or pornographic content.

• Integrate and Extend:

  Derive synergy with Lulu to get brand recognition to your offering. Lulu can help you establish your brand and bring it to millions of users. We'll feature the best applications in our App Gallery, providing you instant access to Lulu's dedicated user base.

Feedback

Participate in the developer forums to assist and learn from the community and help us improve our API offerings. One of Lulu’s top priorities is building and exposing a better open platform for book publishing and discovery. We cannot do it without your support and feedback.