I recently got in to the hobby of printing out entire books; you know, those books that are outrageously expensive to get a physical copy of, because it's a scarcely read book published by a US uni, sold overseas as rarely as it is read.

Brrt goes the university printer, brrt goes my university money, albeit way less than buying the book and shipping. <10$ for a 400 page book! Yeah! Woohoo!

So with all of those A4's I have the entire book. But it's a lot of A4's, and contrary to Air Force (A4s) sneakers, these A4's are clunky with difficulty to sort. So I want to give these books a back. Are there any resources to check out for this type of stuff? There's gotta be a bookbinder culture somewhere, just like our train culture here.

Also, also, also, also: I print out a lot of articles. Would be nice to be able to group a set of articles by the same author or perhaps subject to one. But the problem in this case is: book grows as time goes. I want to be able to bind the book quick and easy, and I'm unsure if a folder works best here. Or perhaps there are nice folders for these uses. Idk.

Sorry for writing like this, it's 4am and I'm starting this thread, with no regard to whether it'll be shit or not.

  • Bobson_Dugnutt [he/him]
    ·
    3 years ago

    Years ago I got an ancient laser printer (old enough to have a SCSI cable iirc) and wore it out printing off public domain books.

    I got some program (don't remember the name of it) that would print four pages on a single piece of letter paper folded in half, but you had to feed the pages in a certain order and orientation so it would print the right pages on the front and back. I bound them paperback style by folding all the pages in half, stacking them in order, and gluing a larger piece of cardstock on the spine for the cover. You can also sew the pages together and put on a hard cover if you're feeling fancy.