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Show HN: Printable Classics – Free printable classic books for hobby bookbinders

83 points by bookman10

by reedlaw

2 subcomments

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.

by staplung

2 subcomments

by gibspaulding

1 subcomments

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.

by robcohen

0 subcomment

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.

by storystarling

0 subcomment

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!

by m-hodges

2 subcomments

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.

by xtiansimon

0 subcomment

Affiliate link usage says something about the intended audience I think, which is interesting.

by soupymcsoup

1 subcomments

This is very cool. I've played around with bookbinding years ago and this site might just bring me back.

by oneseven

0 subcomment

> 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.

by poulpy123

1 subcomments

Nice work ! I started to look into bookbinding a few months ago. Is your pipeline open source ?