I've been getting bookbinding lately on a whim. My computers are full of ebooks but my home is scarce on real books. Ordering books online is playing roulette -- some of the counterfeits being sold are unreadable. The good news about bookbinding is, aside from the initial investment for a printer, books are very cheap to make! And a book takes less time to make than it does to read.

the state of my workplace, after being vandalized by a naughty boy

Cardboard, paper, thread, glue, and fabric are all quite cheap. It costs me under $5 to make a book. Against the admonishment of "frugal" friends, I purchased a Brother DCP-L2540DW laser printer. It prints good quality prints and refills are relatively affordable. I am quite blessed to live in a place where all the physical components of books are dirt cheap, and the local fabric, especially, is quite beautiful.

My first "casebound" book was the Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs. The cover is quite luxurious and feels good to hold. The inside is a collection of "signatures" (little booklets); I poke holes through the spines of the booklets before sewing them together. Then, I glue the spine with a small piece of cardstock on it; while that dries, I glue cardboard panels the size of the spine and each cover to fabric with 0.7mm spacers to act as a "hinge." Glue it all together and it's complete.

...But the inside is a crappy PDF, oh no!

I got on top of this issue by working out a process to push Epub files through LaTeX to imposed pages, so the insides of my newer books are beautiful and look as books should. Shout out to Pandoc!

How I turn epub to html to markdown to LaTeX to PDF:

https://wiki.gikopoi.com/o/BookPrinting.4

This process works quite well with the collection on StandardEbooks but it has also worked well on commercially available Epubs.

My first book: Pale Fire, bound in a cardboard box that once contained Mentos candy.