Print Books?

I FOUND IT!! I have discovered the motherlode for printing books at home!

For anyone who uses The Baldwin Project, Gutenberg Project, Robinson Curriculum, or other books-to-print, well, you will understand my joy.

We print out the pages in portrait orientation, double-sided, and stick them into a binder. It works. Technically. Hard for me to keep track of (we have too many binders laying about), and it's difficult to curl up on the couch with a cup of hot chocolate and a good book when the book is the size of a fully grown binder. So, while we thoroughly enjoy the stories, we don't get to enjoy the books as well as if they were smaller, or actually bound. Binders don't travel well in the car. They don't fit in the little daypacks. pages tear out frightfully easily. Not a big issue when compared to, say, whether to use Golden Rice to ship to developing nations, I know. But something to deal with nonetheless.

So, I've been trying to find something that will allow me to print these books in a portrait layout, two-up on a page, and then fold or bind the books so that we'll have smaller finished product with which to work (8 1/2 by 5 1/2).

I suppose, if you're married to a mathematician, or have the whatsit to run a desktop publishing software, you might have the resources at your disposal to figure out the page layout for 5 1/2 by 8 1/2 book printing... I, uh, don't. I can finagle my way through maybe an eight-page print up, but even that's pushing it. Zorak could figure it out, but I can think of eight thousand and three things, straight off the top of my head, that he'd rather do than help me figure out what page order to put Five Little Peppers for printing.

This brings me to the psychotically exciting stuff I found last night!

Gigabooks sells a hand binding press. You can make your own books, complete with covers. The press is pricey for your average homeschool endeavor, but I'm pretty sure Zorak could only think of fifty or sixty things he'd rather do than try to make me something that would do the job. That still leaves enough room for negotiation into buying one!

They carry covers, lamination sheets (actual sheets for this purpose, not the contact paper I normally use), and two different size presses. Oodles of possibilities began dancing in my mind, blurring my budgetary process.

While perusing that site, I found (angels sing in the background) ClickBook. This nifty bit o' software will rotate, shrink-to-fit, sort and send your newly organized project to your regular, everyday printer for you! I think I swooned. I may have even done the excited-toddler-full-body-vibration. They have over 170 layouts you can use, but I mention this solely for the booklet printing. Oh, and the Day Planner layout. (Who hasn't had to customize their Day Planner into a completely unrecognizable form in order to get it to work well? Now, it's fully customizable!) WOOHOO!

Now to find my RC disks...

Kiss those babies!
~Dy