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Show HN: Printable Classics – Free printable classic books for hobby bookbinders (printableclassics.com)

85 points by bookman10 ↗ HN
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!

10 comments

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m-hodges
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.
poulpy123
Nice work ! I started to look into bookbinding a few months ago. Is your pipeline open source ?
soupymcsoup
This is very cool. I've played around with bookbinding years ago and this site might just bring me back.
storystarling
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
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...

oneseven
> 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
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.
gibspaulding
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.
robcohen
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.
xtiansimon
Affiliate link usage says something about the intended audience I think, which is interesting.