Book Printing General

[rancher]

This is a splinter from our /lit/ thread. The next time I make a book from start to finish, I'll include steps, photos, and notes here; until then, enjoy reading the guide for converting EPUB books to physical books from the giko wiki: https://wiki.gikopoi.com/o/BookPrinting.4

If anyone wants help learning to make books or wants to show off your projects, this is the place for such discussions. If enough people become interested in DIY books maybe we can have contests.

Question #1 - why make a book?

Books are expensive, not all physical books for sale are high quality, DIY is fun and cheap. We live in a golden era of digital libraries where virtually any book worth reading can instantly downloaded as a high-quality EPUB file for free; physical book collections enhance spaces; collecting things is fun and making a collection of things you made yourself is double fun. Giving away books is triple fun!

There are also cases where people want books that do not physically exist; examples may include the knowledge found in wikis or things like fanfiction.

Question #2 - how to make a book?

There are a billion youtube videos and blogs on how to do this, but the essence is you print out pages and then join them together. Effort input to the process is proportional to the quality output. For high quality books, you need to build multiple "signatures" of typeset pages ; signatures are then joined together. For standard printer paper, a signature is 5 two-sided printed pages with 4 book pages per sheet of paper, folded into a booklet, for 20 book pages per signature. A collection of booklets are sewn together and then glued into a cover to produce a high quality hardback book.

The lowest effort way is to simply naively print out something on the computer and then spiral bind it or 3 hole punch it and stick it in a binder. But "imposing" a book into signatures and sewing them together makes a better result (takes maybe 1 hour of work); using a more advanced technique to turn digital writing into PDFs will also yield a better end-result.

The process laid out in the linked Gikopoi Wiki article explains how to turn an epub into a high-quality novel PDF with less work and better results than trying to use Microsoft Word or other proprietary GUI tools.

[TheEvilShadoo]

Very cool stuff. I read EPUBs and PDFs from time to time and am generally fine with enjoying eBooks as eBooks. Having more physical books also requires having more physical space to store them, but this is largely a personal problem due to having a small room.

Perhaps making DIY physical books for Chaos;Child: The Wrong-Sider Memoirs and Chaos;Child: Children’s Revive could make for fun projects. I would post back if I ever were to do this.

[Maypews]

I unfortunately suffer from the grave ailment known as "being a zoomer", and consequently I have become somewhat interested in learning how to write cursive after never being taught to do it in school. Alongside this I thought it would be cool to custom make some sort of journal to write and practice in, but if I did use a journal I would like to just have one instead of having to constantly replace or cycle it (as I'll probably use it for personal memoirs as well). So I thought perhaps it would be good to bind one so that I can (presumably, let me know if I'm wrong) add paper to it over time if it were to ever get low, and then I remembered we had a thread on here for this purpose.

So I was wondering, where should I start with this? I would like to make it look nice. My ideal would probably be to buy an old Victorian era hardcover from EBay or something and use that, or maybe just buy an actual old journal and then add paper to it if needed. Is this a bad idea for someone with no experience? Should I try practicing with something simpler first? Would love your input, @rancher

[rancher]

> if I did use a journal I would like to just have one instead of having to constantly replace or cycle it

I think what you'd be looking for is a binder, but the pages inside really aren't designed to be moved in/out of the binder multiple times. You should just get a set of cheap notebooks and devote one each to a topic (eg "to-do", "games", "memoirs" etc) if you plan to be writing any significant volume of text. If you do go the binder route, they can be pimped out and customized, but if you're looking at classic solutions... this is probably not what your grandparents and beyond were using



If you're planning on adding paper, how realistically thick are you wanting this book to become? Especially if you're planning to reread old stuff, I think multiple volumes make more sense. Any book starts becoming unwieldy after 200-300 pages I say.

Journals as I know them tend to have the pages sewn into a nice binding so they can handle daily wear-and-tear and then be revisited frequently as time goes on. Binders can be nice for holding and collecting information but imo don't make a ton of sense unless you want to add, like, photos and printouts and receipts I guess, idk.

I have filled almost 10 notebooks in the past few years. For journaling and writing articles, I like special Japanese notebooks that are designed to handle fountain pen ink well. For everything else I use cheap generic notebooks and they get the job done. For my journal, I like A5-sized paper (roughly the size of a sheet of printer paper folded in half) -- it's a comfortable size for collecting a few paragraphs but the page size isn't so big I feel crazy trying to fill it all in.


Write with a pen! No backspace, no delete. If some sentence is really going nowhere, X it out. Here's the best thing you can do if you plan on writing much at all: get a fountain pen. They are very smooth to write with and take almost no pressure. You can get a cheap starter fountain pen with some pen ink inserts for under $10 and upgrade if you want an even better experience. Once you have a fountain pen, it lasts just about forever, and ink refills are cheaper (and more eco!) than buying ballpoints / gel pens. Going to pen and paper does something for the brain when writing that a pencil just won't do, and fountains are the king of pens. They're like the mechanical keyboard of pens.





Two of my favorite fountain pens, my August journal, and one of my favorite (tobacco, meerschaum) pipes.