>Originally I made myself one out of softwood, but I found that the wood bent too much and didn't give an even pressure over the spine when the nuts were tightened down
Never made a bookpress, but have transferrable knowledge. You didn't need a rigid piece of wood, you need a piece with a slight curve so the middle touches first and the edges after. When the nuts are tightened it will go straight but be pushing hard in the middle. In case you don't have a bent piece of wood, you can plane or even sand the subtle curve (I would guess 3mm/ 1/8" would do for an A5 book). I am itching to try this.
'Real' books seem to have some kind of linen scrim rather than tissue. I should imagine this helps with tensile strength like glass fibre tape does to GRP. Evo stick has a very pungent solvent smell, worth taking care of ventilation to avoid getting high
Sounds like an ideal job for a 3d printer. You can program in the thickness, height, and amount of flex, and as long as you print it with the vertical axis vertical the "grain" of the print will make sure it flexes instead of breaking.
(Personally, I just use a hole punch and zip ties when I make books, though.)
Or, you know, a piece of timber and some sand paper.
The consumer-grade 3d printers I have exposure to would have trouble with some combination of piece length, tensile consistency, strength and durability you'd want in a book press. Printing alone would take longer than sanding and drilling. And I suspect a printed part wouldn't be so forgiving of adjustments made after manufacture.
Using the 3d printer because it's fun and a learning experience is fine, but calling it "ideal" when it doesn't offer any real improvements over the cheaply and easily made "traditional" material is going a little bit too far :-).
I absolutely disagree. Printing might take longer than sanding and drilling, but: I can model it in code, I can make sub-scale proofs of concept, and when it comes to actually making the real thing, I can throw it on the printer and go do something else. While your wife is yelling that you're still in the garage making noise and sawdust at 8:00 PM, my wife and I will be on the deck eating barbecue and sipping a margarita. :)
Or just increase the length under tension, i.e. make the bar taller. A slight curve might help too, one or two strokes with a file or a plane would probably be enough.
The only thing that comes close to the experience of a real book is my 13" e-ink reader. I spent way too much money on it, but it is pretty fantastic for reading technical and non-fiction books. I can get by on a phone or a standard sized Kindle with fiction, but the bigger form factor is just so much nicer, especially for anything that has maps, or tables, or code listings.
I have been looking in to this. I actually posted a question on why the cost of larger e-ink readers is so much higher than equivalent tablets:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15787026
I'm not sure if they're even taking orders anymore; I sort of had to whine and send them a few emails to get them to get it shipped out to me when their order from the manufacturer came in. But that aside, it's pretty decent piece of kit, I can actually read PDFs on it, the stylus and note-taking app actually work really well. I have to side-load an older version of the Kindle app, which is kind of irritating, but manageable.
Isn't that what Fedex/Kinko's/etc sort of stores do? Printing, organizing, presentation, that sort of thing? Cities tend to have a number of small businesses along those lines, too. Beyond printing, they can usually do different kinds of simple bindings, although it's not quite up to the level of quality you'd see in a glued codex like this post.
I've also had good luck with libraries, for things like spine repair and binding advice. Larger branches will probably even have their own equipment for book-binding sitting around somewhere.
For me, the missing tactile feedback from the tablet puts me off. I need to feel the edge of the papers, and one side of the book getting thinner and the other thicker as I progress. The very act of splitting the book open is satisfying.
I say that and I am a very tech-inclined person, so to speak. But books are always a different matter.
I've basically reported the same as you, and I too am (was?) very technical, trying to optimize and thinking that tablets were a super set of books.
The edge has a deep link to my memory, scanning with my thumb is more satisfying than having instant full text fuzzy search, which is paradoxical since search is more powerful.
I ended up thinking that we do need physical stimuli. A lot. And that our brain likes to reflect from physical to ideal, if we skip a step, we deprive/depress the system. It will work but less so than having a right blend of physical then ideal brain stimulation.
Also, books doesn't distract, a tablet is a book reader, and 120 other things, including a gateway to internet which is a known addiction now, so for some, there's always a slight effort to make when reading a book that is not already captivating enough or difficult at times. Dead trees are passive things, and you have no other option than to focus all your mind to them.
> I ended up thinking that we do need physical stimuli. A lot. And that our brain likes to reflect from physical to ideal, if we skip a step, we deprive/depress the system. It will work but less so than having a right blend of physical then ideal brain stimulation.
This. It's especially evident when you're trying to learn: a physical book gives you more sensations to associate with. Taping on a small kindle screen gives you a much less varied experience.
I'm doing the reverse... scanning or buying books or manuals into pdf form.
I realized I accumulated way too many books. They take up a lot of space, I don't read many of the often but would hate to lose the information. Thus I've slowly converted over the years. Also many pdf format books are cheaper than paper copy these days. I still keep the important books as paper copy but a bulk of the rest now fits is a harddrive available on my home network.
A lot of books can be found as PDF or ePub on pirate sites. If you already paid for the physical book there is zero moral issue in pirating a digital version of the book rather than spending your time manually scanning it and having to deal with OCR problems etc.
So yeah I recommend you always look for a pirate version first before you decide to scan.
You will come across a lot of spam, but if you know what to look for it's pretty easy to quickly distinguish fake sites from the legit ones. If you don't know what to look for you will discover that soon enough after you've run across enough fake and real sites.
Edit: I see below that you already do this. Leaving this comment up though in case it helps other users.
Interested to hear your process for this. I remember a DIY book scanner some years ago but OCR etc have progressed a lot in the 5 years or so since I last read about that. Do you have some kind of dedicated scanner? Just photos? What do you use for processing.
I’d love to do this for the bookshelf of reference books that I still occasionally reach out to but are taking up a ton of space.
For things like manuals, data books and those that are no longer sold I just search Google or archive.org for pdf copies.
For other commercial books, the easiest thing is something like 1DollarScan.com which will tear open the book bindings and scan for you.
Other approaches that worked in the past include 1) knew a family member who worked in a copy store where I could play with a fast scanner. 2) Some publishers like Oreilly's in the past let you get pdf copies for free or nominal price if you provide proof that you bought a paper copy. 3) I have scanner at home for small books or documents but it is usually too much manual work.
But largely over the past 5+ years, I only buy DRM free pdf books. Many of the technical book publishers have sales throughout the year on their website where you can buy books at steep discount. I'm just a pdf book packrat :)
I have a huge fascination for technology that doesn't depend on forcing movement of electrons. I also think it's an important sustainability issue that we feel at least somewhat responsible to collectively, in our immediate social environments, don't forget how to do things "the old way".
It doesn't have to start at global scale mutual destruction. A smaller community can go through a crisis and be left with little means. Does it make sense to suffer really primitive living conditions while waiting
for someone to come and reinstate the tech we're used to?
Isn't it better if, in addition to hoping for external help, we make an effort to avoid forgetting our legacy?
In the unlikely event that it's needed, I can still take pen and paper notes at a hundred words per minute. I can still take and develop film photographs with expired chemistry. I'll still do fast multiplication with a slide rule. I'll cook food safely with a mercury thermometer and camping stove, I'll shave with a sharp blade and be in the next city before you know it on a bicycle.
These are all things you can practise even if you live in a city and deal with computers a lot.
Amazing! This is pretty much the method I described in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15877533 last time we discussed amateur bookbinding, except I also did the slits across the spine and the dental floss. Other than that, even the homemade bookbinding press looks very similar :)
Hah. Could have used this a long time ago. Used to print manuals after hours with a copier that punched holes, and used 3-ring binders. But that's annoying, having a binder full of docs. Comb binding wasn't much better. Saddle-stitching was okay, but you had to use 11x17 paper and didn't work for anything of reasonable length.
I bought an Ibimatic punch at a barrage sale a few years ago - it punches a row of square holes in a page and allows binding using cheap plastic “combs”. The documents are never quite as satisfying as real binding - perhaps because I never took the time to resize the texts and the 8x11 format just isn’t well suited to books.
Never made a bookpress, but have transferrable knowledge. You didn't need a rigid piece of wood, you need a piece with a slight curve so the middle touches first and the edges after. When the nuts are tightened it will go straight but be pushing hard in the middle. In case you don't have a bent piece of wood, you can plane or even sand the subtle curve (I would guess 3mm/ 1/8" would do for an A5 book). I am itching to try this.
'Real' books seem to have some kind of linen scrim rather than tissue. I should imagine this helps with tensile strength like glass fibre tape does to GRP. Evo stick has a very pungent solvent smell, worth taking care of ventilation to avoid getting high