Class up your pirated pdfs.

A redraft of a 40 year old book was finished and rather than waiting a year to buy a copy I printed the pdf and bound the book myself. Here's how I did it.

Step 1: Sew Them Folios

Make your bootleg book beautiful.

Step 1: Find the book you want for free on the internet.

Step 2: Print the book

Step 3: Begin binding

In this instructable we will be showing how to bind very large textbook sized books. Once you have printed the pages break them up into folios. Folios are the individual groupings of pages. Each folio in my case was about 10-15 pages. Collect the pages into a folio, use binder clips to hold them together, and sew. I used a w-stitch pattern with the widest length (7mm).

I made many mistakes, sewing the wrong side of the folio or having inconsistent stitch width, none of it mattered. Have a seam ripper near by.

I used this w-stitch which looks really nice, but there are a tone of options that would work.

Step 2: Glue Folios Together

Step 0: Once you have the folios sewn together stack them up.

Step 1: To attach the folios together we are going to glue them. In other binding processes you might sew together the folios but because we have so many we're doing it differently.

Step 2: Get some wood glue. It works great for paper, dries slowly enough that we have time to work with it and can be mixed with a little water (wood glue is water soluble- which helps with cleanup too) so that it will spread easier.

Step 3: Once the wood glue has been thinned get a paint brush and glue the the folios together. Shown in the last picture I used a piece of rail (10 lbs) to press the folios together before adding another, only about 20 seconds.

Step 4: Once the folios are glued together continue to let them press and dry for 24 hours, if you'd like you can take this time to cut the folio threads, knowing that the glue will hold the thread in place.

Step 3: Add Backing to Folios

Step 1: Glue the backing of the folios. Use hot glue to glue together the backs of the folios. Hot glue is easy to work with and provides another connection to hold the folios together. I added a piece of scrap wood for rigidity. I really liked this move- it makes the binding look a lot more classy and changes how the book feels.

Step 4: Add Book Cover

Step 1: Now add a book cover. I used a piece of vinyl- it has a great feel and looks super bougie. You could also use wool, leather, or pleather. If you use normal fabric you could also laser etch the title into it. I chose not to add a backing to the vinyl because it already had a soft underside I liked. I cut the cover to size and then glued it with E6000, a super glue that is still flexible after drying- which works great for things that move against each other.

Step 2: Show it off. Once the superglue has dried and the glue no longer gives off fumes (24-48 hours) its ready to read.

The whole project took a couple days, the folios took a few hours to sew including some sewing machine debugging and the gluing the parts together was probably another few hours, most of the time was just waiting. Even with my mistakes it looks great and I'd totally do this again.