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bookman10yesterday at 3:34 PM2 repliesview on HN

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.


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ramses0yesterday at 5:34 PM

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!

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4ndr3vvyesterday at 4:40 PM

> materials are probably around a penny per page

plus the cost of toner and paper?

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