This is encouraging, though. Someday soon, someone will come up with the all-singing, all-dancing e-book and print book package, and it’ll fill a much-neglected gap.

Meanwhile, though, I’d like to say that I’ve been using Scrivener (http://www.literatureandlatte.com) to output e-books lately, and — aside from being a wonderful program for keeping all the files for a writing project in one place, letting you work in split-windows, and such — it exports ePub and Mobi files beautifully, with an automatic table of contents, cover art, and meta-data, too.

http://www.sourcefabric.org/en/booktype

Booktype is a free, open source platform that produces beautiful, engaging books formatted for print, Amazon, iBooks and almost any ereader within minutes. Create books on your own or with others via an easy-to-use web interface. Build a community around your content with social tools and use the reach of mobile, tablet and ebook technology to engage new audiences.?

Hamish is correct. A creative commons printshop is an excelent idea. InkScape and Scribus are great tools for smaller projects like ‘zines, covers, and graphics. I tend to use other tools to do the bulk of my book typesetting/layout. TeX (rhymes with blech) and GUI wrappers for it like LyX work well for larger projects.

http://www.ctan.org
http://www.lyx.org

Another interesting tool is writer2latex. It converts OpenDocument format into other formats like LaTeX. This would allow people to edit their books using Open Office or Libre Office and then convert them to LaTeX for high quality typesetting.

http://writer2latex.sourceforge.net/

Happy Hacking!

Rick

Personally, I’ve found both Scribus and Inkscape to be a little too programmer-y, Java-y for me, but they’re definitely very powerful tools — and free, which is hard to beat. Happily, there’s an increasing number of inexpensive but very polished programs for graphics and layout, so we have lots of choice these days.

Best of luck with your self-publishing efforts, and do come back and show us what you produce! I’m currently reading a book created by a guy who listened to my podcast and used these ideas to publish his own novel, and I’ve learned things from his application of them — so it comes around, it goes around!

http://www.scribus.net/canvas/Scribus
http://inkscape.org/

Otherwise, your description of adventures in self-publishing is overwhelmingly helpful and I am glad to have found it. Thank you!

I work in a small print shop, where we try to help people create their own books, like this. I’m used to doing runs of 200-1000 of one book at a time. Therefore, I wanted to mention that when we do perfect binding, we glue a whole stack of books at a time, then take them apart to add the covers individually.

What we do is use two tall boards, nailed together to create a tall corner to flush up a stack of books. We stack our books with a slipsheet between each book (like a waxpaper or vellum cut to the same size as all the other sheets). Then, we flush them up against the corner, using a flat board on the third side and weight them down on the top. Then, you can brush your glue against the whole stack until you are ready to add your covers. Then, you unweight the stack, and slit each book apart with a blunted knife on either side of each slipsheet. Then, you can add your covers.

Also a not on printers. For those who want to do a few hundred in a run of single color ink printing, I would recommend you look into finding a used duplicator machine, like a risograph. There are often churches and community groups selling ones in decent shape (prices vary by models). Again, this isnt for those making small quantities of books but for those who want a better way to get their words out there.

Just food for thought. Im glad to see so many people doing this.

Which is best? I don’t know. I’ve never owned a Phaser, but I’d assume they’re expensive to run. I did own a second-hand colour laser printer at one point, and found it consumed a lot of pricey toner cartridges, and the images it printed had a shiny finish to them I didn’t like.

Ultimately, I went back to using an inkjet printer for my covers and an entry-level (grayscale) laser printer for my inside pages, and I’m perfectly happy with that result. For Christmas, my mum got a colour inkjet that even duplexes, which I wish mine did, and it’s just a basic consumer model.

I don’t know anything about the kind of job you’re doing or what size of a print run you’re looking at, but unless you’re setting up a full-scale publishing house, I’d suggest starting simple rather than breaking the bank on “ideal” equipment that’ll probably be overkill.

In the past, I tried adjusting the paper tray of my laser printer to A5 and selected that as the paper size to print to, and it did sort of work, but the paper jammed far too frequently on the small sheets, so I went back to imposing my pages four-up on a sheet and cutting the sheet in half, as I described above.

I hope that helps!