Unknown authors looking to break into the book market might have a better shot after Lulu.com, the self-publishing site started by Red Hat co-founder Bob Young, said it will allow its users to sell their eBooks to readers for free.

"Being able to give away content for free is the ultimate marketing tool in this changing electronic market, which has become more and more dependent on impulse buying patterns," said Young, CEO of Lulu.com, in a release.

Lulu.com said both traditional and self-published authors are increasingly using free eBooks to boost overall sales.

The company cited Cory Doctorow, author of "With a Little Help," who said readers treat free eBooks as "enticements, not replacements" for print books.

Bob Young, whose passion for online publishing and free Internet content is hardly a secret, has committed more of his fortune to the cause.

Young has donated $50,000 to ibiblio, the online library and digital archive based at UNC-Chapel Hill.
 
Young became wealthy as the founder and former CEO of Red Hat, the Raleigh-based Linux software company. He now runs Lulu.com, another Raleigh company that sells e-books and helps authors self-publish their works.

He also has long ties to ibiblio, and previously has provided financial support to the archive. His latest gift came through the Triangle Community Foundation on behalf of Lulu.

Attention wealthy sports fans: If buying part of the local hockey team is too rich for your blood, how about a stake in the soccer squad?

The owners of the Carolina RailHawks are seeking new investors "to participate in the next, exciting phase of growth" of the Cary-based professional soccer franchise. Its backers now include majority owner Selby Wellman, a former Cisco Systems executive, as well as Lulu.com CEO Bob Young, Brian Wellman and Dr. H. Paul Singh.

The owners are looking for a $1 million investment from one to three potential partners, RailHawks spokesman Marco Rosa wrote in an e-mail. And they do have some unnamed prospects.

Bob Young's effort to build an e-books empire got some major media attention this morning.

In a front-page story about digital outlets that allow authors to self-publish books, the Wall Street Journal included Young in its list of "The Stars of Self-Publishing." Young is CEO of Raleigh-based Lulu, which helps authors publish more than 20,000 new titles every month.

The newspaper's list puts Young in elite company, with other "stars" such as Amazon.com CEO Jeff Bezos, Barnes & Noble CEO William Lynch and Apple CEO Steve Jobs. The list also includes executives from smaller Lulu rivals such as Smashwords, FastPencil, Scribd and Author Solutions.

Unfortunately for Lulu and Young, most of the article focuses on Amazon's digital self-publishing push.

Bob Young is a big John Grisham fan.

Young, the CEO of Lulu.com, notes on his blog that sales for the Raleigh company's self-published authors are up since it added more than 700,000 traditionally published books to its site in April. That includes books by Grisham, left, the wildly popular author of "The Firm" and other legal thrillers.

Young thanks Grisham on his blog, pointing out that new visitors seeking to buy books by mainstream authors also are discovering less-known writers and titles. Since adding the traditional titles, sales by Lulu authors are up 15 percent, and page views are up 25 percent, Young writes.

About half the people buying traditional books are new to Lulu, and 60 percent of those customers also bought a book by a Lulu author, Young writes.

Raleigh-based online book publisher Lulu has postponed plans for an initial public offering because it ran into weak demand among investors.

CEO and founder Bob Young and the company's investment bankers had wanted to go public on the Toronto Stock Exchange this week, but weren't able to get the price they wanted.

The company on Wednesday reduced the proposed price of its IPO to about $7 per share, from $8 to $9.50 each. But that still wasn't enough to lure prospective investors worried about Lulu's financial future and the shaky stock market.

"It is a minor disappointment, but only a minor one because we've only delayed it," Young said in a phone interview today. "We pulled the IPO simply because the valuations that we were being offered was just not where we believed the value of the company is."

Lulu is one of this region's small but fast-growing technology companies that continue to hire and drive the Triangle's economy. An IPO would have given Lulu more money to pay for further expansion.

There might be one small snag with Bob Young's plans to take Lulu.com public.

If the millionaire-entrepreneur moves ahead with an initial public offering for his Raleigh-based online book publisher, he'll need a ticker symbol for the shares.

But a Vancouver-based company, athletic clothing retailer Lululemon Athletica, already trades on the Nasdaq under the ticker symbol "LULU."

Ironically, Young is eyeing an IPO in Canada -- his home turf is a cheaper place to list a new stock.

And that's good news for Lulu: Ticker symbols for stocks listed on the Toronto Stock Exchange are a maximum of three letters.

Lululemon stock, which went public in 2007, trades under the symbol "LLL" in Canada.

So here are a few suggestions for Lulu's proposed Canadian ticker: BOK, BUK, BK, PUB, LUL, LU, RED (as in "read," also a nod to Young's previous IPO, when he ran Raleigh-based software company Red Hat) or HAT (again, a nod to Red Hat, but Young often wears one).

Lulu.com could soon land a whole lot of Loonies.

The Raleigh-based company is considering an initial public offering in Canada, according to a published report.

Citing industry sources, Dow Jones Newswires reported that Lulu is aiming to raise as much as 50 million Canadian dollars. The company has hired Genuity Capital Markets and CIBC World Markets as the IPO's leading underwriters, Dow Jones reported.

Lulu spokesman Jonathan Cox said it's company policy not to comment on rumors or speculation.

Lulu was founded in 2002 by CEO Bob Young and now helps authors self-publish about 15,000 new titles a month. Young is no stranger to Canada or IPOs.

Lulu.com will begin selling electronic books by traditional authors, expanding beyond its lineup of self-published titles for the first time.

By offering 200,000 titles from popular authors such as Dan Brown and Malcolm Gladwell, the Raleigh-based online book publisher is trying to attract more mainstream book browsers.

But the strategy also puts Lulu in more direct competition with the world’s biggest book sellers, including Amazon.com.

“As we get more selection on Lulu, we become more relevant to all kinds of readers,” said Harish Abbott, senior vice president of products.

Lulu was founded by Bob Young, left, who relishes playing an underdog role and taking on bigger corporations. Young was the former CEO of Red Hat, the Raleigh company that is the world’s largest distributor of Linux open-source software – and a rival for Microsoft.

As Red Hat prepares to join the Standard & Poor's 500 Index, it's worth noting another milestone for the Raleigh company's stock.

It was 10 years ago next month that Red Hat made its dazzling Wall Street debut. In August 1999, at the height of the dot-com boom, the little Linux software company that could sold shares in an initial public offering.

And what an IPO it was: The 272 percent first-day gain (or "pop") still ranks among the best. The company and its CEO who favored a red fedora, Robert "Bob" Young, attracted international attention. By December of that year, the stock was trading above $100 a share.

But the dot-com bust wasn't kind. By the week of Sept. 11, 2001, Red Hat shares had dropped to around $3.

Since then, the company has gone through various changes: moving its headquarters to Raleigh, adding several new faces at CEO (Matthew Szulik and now Jim Whitehurst) and shifting its stock to the New York Stock Exchange from Nasdaq.

Late Friday, S&P announced that the stock will join its iconic list of 500 Wall Street powerhouses after the close of trading on July 24. Only one other Triangle company shares that distinction: Raleigh-based Progress Energy.