Show HN: Printable Classics – Free printable classic books for hobby bookbinders

32 points by bookman10 5 hours ago

I created a site (https://printableclassics.com) that allows you to download classic books and customize things like the font size, page size, and the cover.

As part of this, I wrote a software pipeline that takes epubs, html files, or pdfs and converts them into formatted books with custom covers, page numbers, chapter formatting, etc.

I used an LLM for categorizing the books. There's a nice way to filter such that you could easily find "Young Adult, Ancient, Fantasy" for example.

When downloading from the site, the PDFS are rendered in a work queue. Hopefully the server I'm using won't get overwhelmed. It takes around 10-15 seconds to generate for most books.

Most of the books currently on the site are from Standard Ebooks. I plan to add more books from Archive.org and Project Gutenberg over time.

I also created a little guide on how you can print and bind books at home with around $200 in equipment. (https://printableclassics.com/print-guide)

Printable versions of the Harvard Classics are available here: https://printableclassics.com/harvard_classics This is an example of direct PDF conversion.

Hopefully this is useful to some people. I plan to use the books here for home education myself so it will at least be useful to me. I'd like to add a guide with top suggestions by age level and some educational theory on how I made the selections. I'm happy to take any feedback on the site or answer any questions.

There is also the option to have the books professionally printed through a print on demand provider. I'm hoping that could be a way to pay for the site hosting.

Thanks for checking it out!

staplung - 15 minutes ago

Very cool, thanks for putting this up.

Couple of observations:

- the page size drop down doesn't display any units (e.g. "6 x 9"). I assume there're all in inches but it would be a little more helpful if it said so and/or included a common name (e.g. US Letter) if one exists for that size.

- you might want to look into page imposition[1] something that's basically essential for any kind of stitched binding (as opposed to "perfect binding"). Full-blown imposition software is often ridiculously expensive and can have quite a few options so it's definitely both an engineering and UI challenge. In the meantime, Bookbinder JS[2] is a great site that I think runs entirely client side and can transform any PDF.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imposition

2: https://momijizukamori.github.io/bookbinder-js/?paperSize=LE...

storystarling - 16 minutes ago

Nice work! We create personalized children's books - parents share their idea and photos, and AI brings their custom story to life with their child as the protagonist. We do hybrid fulfillment depending on the country. The PDF formatting challenges you mentioned are very real!

soupymcsoup - an hour ago

This is very cool. I've played around with bookbinding years ago and this site might just bring me back.

bookman10 - an hour ago

Thanks, I'll definitely feel proud if I see someone else actually make one of these books.

m-hodges - 2 hours ago

I recently got into watching YouTube bookbinding as a way to fall asleep at night. Then I found a local book and stationary studio for hobbyists to learn as a community. It’s not something I have time for right now, but it’s the kind of hobby I’d love to try one day.

bookman10 - an hour ago

It's a really neat hobby. It's great for gifts, especially if you take the high quality artistic approach. I like to do simple "perfect binding" because it saves money (materials are probably around a penny per page), gets me the book faster than buying it, and makes all my books consistent in font, size, and cover style.
- 4ndr3vv - 20 minutes ago
  
  > materials are probably around a penny per page
  plus the cost of toner and paper?
  - bookman10 - 5 minutes ago
    
    That would be including paper and toner, although it can be more.
    For example, I can buy 5,000 sheets of printer paper for around $50. You use both sides so that would be half a cent per page.
    I use an ink tank printer and you can get maybe a quart of ink for around $15.
    It wouldn't include wear and tear on the printer, which is harder to quantify.
    I also like to use cream colored paper instead of white which adds another half cent per page for perfect binding. Glue for the spine is a penny.
    The cover itself might be around 20 cents of paper and 5 cents of ink.

poulpy123 - an hour ago

Nice work ! I started to look into bookbinding a few months ago. Is your pipeline open source ?

bookman10 - an hour ago

Not yet and it's a little messy now to be honest.
The pipeline itself is in node.js and uses mostly pdf-lib (https://pdf-lib.js.org/) and ebook-convert (https://manual.calibre-ebook.com/generated/en/ebook-convert....)
For epubs, I split the book into chapters and run ebook-convert on each chapter individually, adding an extra page if needed to make the number of pages even. Then I combine all the chapters and do a custom scheme for numbering (because you don't want numbers on blank pages, you want the numbering to start at chapter 1, etc)
For html books from Project Gutenberg for example, I make sure they have text in <p> and chapters in <h2>. Then do a similar logic with ebook-convert.
For pdf books, I just use pdf-lib to draw the pages directly.
I also shift odd pages to the right and even pages to the left so there is a larger inner margin than outer margin.
If you're looking to do custom books, I would just use ebook-convert by itself, it just won't be quite as pretty though because it lacks those improvements.
- poulpy123 - 37 minutes ago
  
  Thanks for the explanation!