what's the print like on amazon ones (.de)? I ordered two books once from lulu and woved never to do that again. Print was unreadable, and I'm not _that_ picky. They blamed it on the authors prep and offered a refund though. I was so mad, and still am that it turned me away from them completely though, unless someone tells me they worked at least some QA in their process.
I would expect it to be good - it's typeset with LaTeX and shipped as a regular (vector) PDF, the rest is on Lulu/Amazon but I don't expect issues there. To be completely honest, I'm still waiting for the author copy from Lulu, which I'm using as a final check before allowing wider distribution (channels that don't allow quick fixes). But I've ordered several books from Lulu in the past, and they were fine, to my (amateur) eyes looked the same as something from a regular publisher (the modern ones likely use the same/similar print-on-demand hardware).
I've found Lulu to be decent quality, much better than other print on demand books like Lightning Source (used by O'Reilly). But they are only a printer/binder and can't correct typesetting problems (well, I suppose they could help or reject them, but I guess they don't).
Yup. They have a lot of resources available on how to do it but what gets printed is 100% the author's (or publisher's) responsibility.