[open-literature] Printing Open Shakespeare texts

Wed Apr 14 12:57:02 UTC 2010

On 7 April 2010 10:46, Ben O'Steen <bosteen at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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)

Very useful info.

> 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.

Sounds like Lulu is best option at the start if you aren't going to do
the binding yourself.

> 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)

Sounds too large-scale for us at this point but we should look to them
for the future.

> 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... :)

That would be *amazing*.

> 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.)

Done.

Rufus

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