This guide is aimed at helping you print out and bind technical manuals, help books and any book that has a price tag that makes you whince. It is not economical or sane to try and clone cheap paperback books for virtually the same cost as it would be in the store.

  • An Inkjet or laser printer
  • Good quality paper (check the weight, anything over 100gsm is good)
  • Ink compatibles (if you're using an inkjet, the official ink is going to make this uneconomical)
  • Sharp scissors or a scalpel (if you're a small child, do not run with these, always get an adult to safely run with scissors)
  • Elephant Tape (The heavy leather type tape, usually silver in colour)
  • The heaviest card your printer is capable of handling (for the book cover)
  • Alternatively you can use photo card for glossy covers
  • Paper glue
  • Two heavy objects to prop up your books while they dry
  • A tape measure or ruler

You've downloaded tonnes of PDF books, found that your head throbs trying to read them all on the screen, your friends PDA seemed like the answer but scrolling around a huge PDF is almost as headache inducing as your bulky CRT monitor. Book binding machinery is expensive and while there are cheap services around that will bind books for you, you may have some trouble getting copyrighted PDF's bound ;) So just how can you read a PDF on the loo?

Printing out your book onto paper is the first step. If you're using an inkjet you're probably dealing with a printer that has a small capacity for paper, perhaps 100 sheets at a time. A book that may have 300 pages is obviously not going to print out in one go. Be sure you fully understand the whole idea of printing on odd and even pages before you embark on a lengthy book print, do a small test run in draft mode with odd pages, reverse the paper and print even pages and check your book is going to come together as you expect.

Some other considerations are the quality and size you can print at. While it is tempting to ramp the quality up and print on nice big fat A4 pages, this will consume a lot of ink and since this is the poor mans guide to book binding we want to keep costs down as low as possible. Ideally you could use a laser printer to print out all the pages cheaply but most of us are faced with an el cheapo inkjet that was designed to eat ink without a care,

Do test prints on your inkjet with varying levels of quality, this will depend entirely on the model of printer you have so it's up to you to find a good balance of quality vs ink consumption. Also consider printing in black only, this is cheaper but check your PDF before hand for colour content. If the amount of colour imagery is low, print in colour as most of the ink is going to be used for the black text anyway.

Consider using A5 paper. This is not as cheap to buy ready cut as A4 but you can make use of a local art store or office supply to have A4 paper gullotined into A5. A5 is just A4 paper cut in half, there should be no charge for this. Printing on A5 may seem a little small but bare in mind you are cutting your paper and ink costs in half (not to mention doubling the print speed) by going this route and any inkjet you'd care to buy today, no matter how cheap will do a great job of printing very clear text on A5 paper. Check out the image of the books above, this represents to scale the difference between an A4 and A5 book. I'd strongly recommend you go the A5 route if you intend printing out a lot of books.

You'll want to print a front cover and back cover to your book, it's a good idea to use much heavier paper for this, ideally card or photo card. Something to bare in mind when printing out the cover, the binding tape will obscure a small portion of the cover, so compensate for this when printing out the cover. Add a margin as pictured in the example on the right.

So hopefully you now have your book printed out, it is a good idea now to take some time to really make sure the stack is perfectly in line. Turn the stack on its side and let it hit your desk side on to encourage all pages to fall in line, turn 90 degrees and repeat the last step. Rotating the book and encouraging all the pages to fall in line to create that perfect block of uniformly aligned pages. This step is important as in order for your book to bind properly, glue must reach each page edge or you're going to end up with pages that just fall out.

Roll out a strip of your packing tape, making sure the strip is longer then the height of the book. At this point you need to decide whether the width of your packing tape is going to be wide enough to wrap around the spine of your book. If not you simply have to roll out another strip and overlay it so you're making your strip of tape wider.

Once you have your strip of tape, lay it flat, sticky side up and apply a very good amount of paper glue. In the picture on the right you can see the glue has been applied only to the center of the tape, no glue needs to reach the edge of your tape as this is already sticky and will happily stick to the side of your book, putting glue at the edges will just mean it oozes out onto your book.

You might ask why bother with glue at all if the packing tape is already sticky. The simple answer to that is the glue is needed to seap into the pages, making them all bind to the spine. This is the trickiest part to this guide so go carefully here. Apply the glue evenly, a bottle of glue with a brush makes this task easier.

Now its just a matter of sitting your book down into the strip of tape, getting it as centred as possible so the tape will wrap up over your book in a straight line.

This can be awkward, this kind of packing tape is extremely adhesive and mis-placing the book now can cause you big headaches trying to correct the alignment.

Notice you only need enough glue to span the width of the spine, so no need to over do it, but make sure there is a good thick bed of glue for the spine.

With the tape folded up neatly over your books spine, you can cut the excess tape off now or leave it to dry and perform this step later.

It can be tricky at this point cutting with scissors as it's very important you keep the pages pressed firmly into the glue in a very even way. In short the less you fiddle with the book now, the better the final result will be.

Use two heavy objects to push up against your book to help keep it together and stable enough to bond to the spine. It's best to leave this now overnight.

Let the glue bond fully to the paper and set as much as it's going to set.

The final step is to apply and glue a strip of card to the spine, and cover with another strip of tape to keep the card seated well on the spine.

And that's all there is to it. Marvel now at how your book can open at any page just like a real book! The spine card will wear in time but this is not important, its job is not to hold the book together, but instead to stop the book sliding out of shape. You can use and abuse a book bound in this way just like one you bought in the shop, it will be just as tough and hard wearing.

However be careful applying pull on page pressure, it is quite possible to pull a page out of a book like this, so just be aware of this limitation and you should be fine. One testament to this procedure is a collection of books I have bound in this way that are more than 6 years old and still in the same condition as the day I bound the books, not a single page missing and they got some serious hammer being propped up here there and everywhere reading them.

If you found this guide useful, please consider that it was given to you freely on the ED2K network. Share a few books for a while as a thanks and help keep the network alive with these wonderful files.

Disclaimer : By reading this guide you give up all your statutory rights. This guide may not be read aloud, distributed by small children or very tall people. This includes but is not limited to being shown to your mom and pets. In the event that this guide should ruin your printer, please see my other guide "How to fix an inkjet with bubblegum"