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.