Bookbinding

Forgive the likely rambling nature of this post. I'm gathering up stuff for my latest fancy, which may end up on my webpage sometime in the future if it holds. Sprinkled through here will be various references for binding your own books and journals, mostly perfect (i.e. glue) bound. And one link on replacing spiral bound notebook covers with your own.

First, though, a rant on the price of books today. I went and figured out how much it would cost me to print copies of public domain books per page. Now, I only calculated the cost of paper and ink, so you can argue it's not a fair comparison, but here's why I think it's at least a rough indicator.

1. I'm paying retail for 24lb paper and home printer ink. A professional company would be using cheaper materials, and buying in bulk. Thus I think those retail costs roughly balance out a overhead costs and profit.
2. I didn't count the glue because such a tiny amount is used that a bottle will last ages and it only adds a few cents to the cost.
3. I didn't count labor because a) this is pretty fun for me, and b) it's all automated at the publishers, particularly when you're talking about paperbacks.

So, we're not really at a level where you can compare cents to cents, but I think you can get a magnitude idea. Now, take a book like, say, the public domain Arsene Lupin novel The Hollow Needle. 196 pages, more or less. Paper and printer costs, I could print and bind my own copy for around $5. (Actually closer to $4, but I don't know that I quite believe HP's claims about how many pages their black cartridge will print, so let's call it $5.) I would check how much it would cost to have Kinkos print it for me, but that's not a trivial estimate, so it'll have to wait for another day. To have it done by Lulu.com would cost $8.45, which I wouldn't begrudge too much since a print-on-demand company has higher overhead and labor costs than a large scale publisher. What's the cost at Amazon.com? $11.99. For less than 200 paperback pages!

Naturally, it varies from book to book. The widely-available Frankenstein (around 350 pages) would cost me $8 to print. The cheapest of mass market paperbacks will cost around $5, but they use cheaper paper. On the other end, though, if you were to take Proserpine and Midas... Wait, you can't take Proserpine and Midas, because it's not in print! *snarls*

An aside: Sooner or later, I want to do a post talking about the book "How to Suppress Women's Writing", which I recently read. For now, though, it's nicely summarized at Cupidsbow's "How Fanfiction Makes Us Poor." Don't let the title turn you off, because the point is that it is not fan fiction that makes women poor, but rather a system than minimizes (and in fan fiction's case, even illegalizes) women's artistic contributions.

Anyway, back to the rant about book prices, it seems to me that this should be something it wasn't even worth calculating. If a company is publishing a paperback copy of something public domain, they ought to be able to do it cheaper than I could do myself, full stop.

However, this does lead to one of my potential webpage fancies. Project Gutenberg is a wonderful thing, but a long novel can be a pain to read on a computer screen. I'm tempted to take some of their texts, format them to be ready to print and bind at home, and put those up in PDF format on my webpage. I could be formatting them as I read them, and it wouldn't be that much more trouble at all. And I like the idea of thumbing my nose at overpriced printing companies. (Actually, in an interview with Michael Hart, Project Gutenberg's founder, talks about how between 1955 and 2005, gas had gone up 10 times over and people bitched and moaned left and right, but in the same time period books had gone up 40 times over, and no one talks about it.)

Of course, once the book is printed, it's got be bound together. So finally, some tutorial links.
First, there's this guy who uses a book press. In the comments there are dimensions and rough instructions on making one. I used one when I bound a copy of Laura's Hand-Me-Downs for Christmas, and liked it.
But, you don't need one if you don't want the trouble, or only want to do one or two things. Instead you can use clothes pens, like this woman uses making her journals (which I think she sells professionally, BTW). Or another site had basically the same thing, except he used rules and binder clips instead of a homemade bookbinding press.
One note here: despite what the first tutorial says, don't use Gorilla Glue. It sucks for book spines. I don't know if the formula has changed since the tutorial was written or what, but it dries hard and brittle. Instead, white glue for a start, or a book-binding PVA glue. I've also seen Poxy Stix-On contact Cement or DAP Weldwood suggested.

If you want to kick it up a notch, Wayne Schmidt is very serious when he binds his books, even matching the size and formatting of professionally printed paperbacks and hardbacks. Even if you don't want to go that far, his instructions are pretty good (and he has another alternative for a bookbinding press).
FYI, I printed Laura's on letter-sized paper cut in half, which Kinkos did for $1.50 a cut (and it only took one cut on a whole ream of paper). A5 paper (or A4 cut in half) would work fine, too. Either is more convenient and less wasteful than cutting commonly available printer paper to professional book size.

One thing to keep in mind is that lots of home printers (ours included) can't print edge to edge. So if you're printing a cover that fills a whole page, either make the background white, put in a white border that blends nicely into the book, or have a professional printing service do it. Some photo printers can print edge to edge, so someone who was going to do a lot of these might consider one of those. (Neh, Laura, remind me. Do we still have that one that came as a near-freebie with my computer, or did we give that to my mom?)

Whomp. I think that does it.