[HN Gopher] Show HN: Printable Classics - Free printable classic...
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Show HN: Printable Classics - Free printable classic books for
hobby bookbinders
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!
Author : bookman10
Score : 63 points
Date : 2026-02-09 12:09 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (printableclassics.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (printableclassics.com)
| m-hodges wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| _> materials are probably around a penny per page_
|
| plus the cost of toner and paper?
| bookman10 wrote:
| 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.
| ramses0 wrote:
| How do you handle printing? I've got a color laser (that I'll
| generally run B&W), but it seems like "pigment inkjet" is
| actually the correct choice for the paper+ink combo.
|
| What's your experience / recommendation?
|
| My technical workflow (for personal books) is `Makefile` +
| `frontmatter.tex` + `chapter-*.md` + `endmatter.tex` and some
| unholy abomination of pandoc or whatever that'll stitch it
| all together and some other software to run imposition, etc.
|
| I'll (at some point) take a look at what you're doing, but
| it's a really neat hobby- I've been doing 1-2 books at a time
| (~50-100 pages) w/ kettle stitching and hard-cover (with
| ribbons of course!).
|
| ...looking through your recommendations, but don't see
| mention of pigment-based ink/printers or short-grain paper
| (ChurchPaper was where I got some of mine from). Is the
| ET-8550 "the one" that you've found? Having something "large
| format" for printing is tempting, but it'd probably be better
| to outsource at $1-5/page compared to a more compact printer.
| What about drying out or long-term storage of inkjet / print
| heads?
|
| re: the Guillotine, I've been tempted by seeing some
| hydraulic manual cutters, but it seems like big space
| investment... how have you experienced it? They're saying 400
| pages (a whole ream?) on the one you've linked but that seems
| like a stretch.
|
| Thanks, and be on the lookout for an email / pdf!
| bookman10 wrote:
| My understanding is that ink tank printers can be cheaper
| per page, but lasers can be faster and possibly more
| durable. I think professional machines tend to be laser
| printers. I haven't had a problem with the heads drying out
| but I try to use my printers at least weekly.
|
| I like the Epson ink tank printers and have been happy with
| them. I usually use cheap generic ink. I wouldn't be
| surprised at all if there are better options though.
|
| I mostly do perfect bound books so I can use normal printer
| paper, center the pages, and it will be in the correct
| grain direction. Otherwise you'll have to order through
| dedicated specialty paper suppliers and also might need a
| larger format printer. In a pinch, you can ignore grain
| direction but the end result definitely isn't as good. Once
| I run out of my current cover paper, I'll probably order
| coated on 1 side short grain paper from some specialty
| paper supplier.
|
| I also use a one sided laminator on the cover which makes
| the cover much more durable.
|
| I think the manual cutter works well enough for me. It does
| work at 400 pages with some muscle. Upgrading to a
| programmable cutter would be the next step for me, but it
| would only be needed if you're making 5+ books a day.
|
| I use a manual perfect binder like this:
| https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/A4-Size-Wireless-
| Desk...
|
| It gives better results than thermal binding, but it's
| probably not worth the investment for most people.
|
| I also like velobinding for short things.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| You could print smaller booklets in half-page format and
| use stapled or sewn binding, for a more durable and
| higher-quality result. That could be done without needing
| a larger-format printer. It might be especially
| appropriate for shorter text such as individual articles,
| and this was often the historical practice with e.g.
| octavo books which were quite popular back in the day.
| bookman10 wrote:
| Yes that works too, it's just the grain direction on
| printer paper runs along the long edge so the books end
| up very stiff if they're folded.
| SubmarineClub wrote:
| Any YT channel recommendations?
| m-hodges wrote:
| Four Keys Book Arts: https://youtube.com/@fourkeysbookarts
|
| DIY Bookbinding: https://youtube.com/@diybookbinding
|
| DAS Bookbinding: https://youtube.com/@dasbookbinding
|
| That's My Bookshelf: https://youtube.com/@thatsmybookshelf
| poulpy123 wrote:
| Nice work ! I started to look into bookbinding a few months ago.
| Is your pipeline open source ?
| bookman10 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Thanks for the explanation!
| soupymcsoup wrote:
| This is very cool. I've played around with bookbinding years ago
| and this site might just bring me back.
| bookman10 wrote:
| Thanks, I'll definitely feel proud if I see someone else
| actually make one of these books.
| storystarling wrote:
| 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!
| staplung wrote:
| 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...
| cbondurant wrote:
| If imposition was something for this site to add, I'd recommend
| doing it through LaTeX with the pdfpages package[1]. You
| generate the pdf normally, then re-lay it out using a second
| latex file dedicated to just doing the imposition. It's how
| I've done all of my imposition so far, and its more than
| powerful enough to do the kind of simple page layout that you
| would want to do with a home printer.
|
| Maybe more complex layout might be needed if you happened to
| have a printer that could handle like, A0 size paper, or
| continuous rolls, which would give more flexibility in terms of
| the number of ways you could fit your pages onto the stock
| material. for the hobbyist though? More than good enough.
|
| 1: https://ctan.org/pkg/pdfpages?lang=en
| bookman10 wrote:
| Thanks, I hadn't seen bookbinder.js, that looks really neat.
| I'll remember that if I get back into sewn binding.
|
| I personally like to use standard A4/letter size paper and
| print one page per side and do perfect binding. Printing two A5
| pages on A4 was my original approach, but then the grain
| direction is wrong for standard computer paper and the pages
| come out too stiff.
|
| I think the quality is good enough for me, but I definitely
| understand the appeal of sewn binding.
| oneseven wrote:
| > Note this page includes affiliate links. [Amazon will earn less
| money if you use these links]
|
| Ha ha. I never thought of that as a selling point for affiliate
| links. I suppose Amazon will make less money if people print
| their own books as well.
| reedlaw wrote:
| This is a fine and useful project, but my experience with newly
| printed classics is the quality is inferior for a number of
| reasons. Besides paper and binding, typesetting is something that
| older editions rarely messed up, but some new editions create a
| facsimile by scanning all the pages and then re-printing. That
| means that instead of getting the crisply defined letters of an
| old printing press, you get fuzzy letters and scan artifacts.
| This (https://printableclassics.com/harvard_classics) shows what
| I mean. Not only is the typesetting quality worse, but the price
| is much higher for the new edition. I don't have a problem with
| the price on Printable Classics ($885 for a new 50 volume set is
| reasonable), but you could often find the same thing cheaper
| used. A used set is $300-$600 on ebay. The value of these PDFs is
| that you could make a higher quality edition as long as the text
| is OCR'ed and properly typeset (which is true of the Moby Dick
| version on the site). For the scanned copies, it would be a big
| undertaking to re-typeset, but I'm sure LLMs could help.
| bookman10 wrote:
| I agree. I wish I had the time to retypeset those. I would be
| concerned though with mildew/mold on old, used versions though.
| reedlaw wrote:
| That's true. Older books require skill to restore, so
| choosing old or new is a balance.
| rahimnathwani wrote:
| I wonder how good a job the ClearScan feature on Adobe Acrobat
| would do. IIRC it creates one or more fonts based the existing
| characters in the PDF. So each lowercase 'a' would look the
| same, and be a sort of average of all the 'a' letters in the
| book.
| bookman10 wrote:
| That's neat. I'll look into that.
| rahimnathwani wrote:
| Sorry, apparently they renamed it to 'Editable text and
| images'.
| gibspaulding wrote:
| I'll be curious to go through your tutorial later as book binding
| is something I'd like to learn. I was really excited recently
| when I was able to get Claude Code to write me a python script to
| generate a custom weekly planner since I haven't found a
| commercially available one laid out like I'd like. Unfortunately
| I haven't found anywhere that can print something pocket sized
| for me, so for it to be actually useful, I'm going to have to
| print and bind it myself.
| bookman10 wrote:
| I had a good experience using Lulu for print on demand books.
| You can order just quantity one if you want to go that route.
| robcohen wrote:
| Interesting. I like the idea of reprinting classics to all look
| identical as a way of designing a library. Would be interesting
| to select a set of books for your kid, have them printed, and
| just put them in their room. I wonder if any startups are doing
| this.
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(page generated 2026-02-09 23:01 UTC)