[open-literature] Printing Open Shakespeare texts

[Ben O'Steen]

The PDFs look fine and should be suitable for use with a service like
Lulu. For a hand-bound book, you'll need to add pages and if you are
attempting a sewn binding with signatures (groups of pages folded and
then stitched together) you'll need to do what is known as page
imposition - reordering the pages so that when printed out on a
duplexing printer, the pages are printed in the correct order for
binding. psbook is a good unix tool that will do this for you with ps
files (pdf2ps to get a workable ps from a pdf)

Lulu.com is fine - you should be able to simply upload the pdfs to it
and it'll be printable. The pricing is expensive, but at least the
pricing and end-results are clear.

http://www.lightningsource.com/ - this corp works more with publishers
or users more likely to buy in bulk. I know of a couple of publishers
that use them for their smaller print runs (Harper-Collins'
http://www.authonomy.com/ for example)

Both these route will give you a book bound with what's known as a
'perfect' binding - good, but it has a store-bought feeling to it, which
isn't quite the same as 'this book is mine'.

This is a good summary of printing options:
http://nomediakings.org/doityourself/doityourself_book_press.html

Hand-binding is doable and isn't as difficult as it may sound. It can
also be relatively cheap once you get the toolset
(http://store.falkiners.com/store/ is good - typically, you'd just need
some thread (pennies), blunt needle, a book awl (£3 or improv), a bone
folder (£4 - worth it), glue (£6 for a tub that'll last) and some card
+paper for the hardcover, if you are doing one.

I'm an amateur at this too, but I'll be happy to vlog an attempt to bind
one of these pdfs? I just need to recover my tools... :)

Ben

(You might want to add a link to all your mailing lists to the 'Get
Involved' tab on the main OKFN site -
http://lists.okfn.org/mailman/listinfo - took me a little while to spot
it and only then via google.)

On Mon, 2010-04-05 at 20:33 +0100, Rufus Pollock wrote:
> Dear Ben,
> 
> To follow up our discussion in Oxford and today re printed copies of
> Open Shakespeare texts, I want to get nice print copies of stuff like:
> 
> <http://www.openshakespeare.org/pdf/hamlet_moby.pdf>
> <http://www.openshakespeare.org/pdf/othello_moby.pdf>
> <http://www.openshakespeare.org/pdf/twelfth_night_moby.pdf>
> 
> Any ideas how best to do this (local binders, lulu, ...) would be very helpful!
> 
> (Any comments on the PDFs, good or bad, also welcome :) )
> 
> Rufus
> 
> PS: would you mind me cc'ing the future of this discussion into our
> open-literature list to keep others up to date?