About

Printerpress.org was conceived of and constructed by Colin J Allan and James P Riordan.

We see the site as a library, in both its archival sense and as a meeting point for a community of people interested in sharing ideas, information and most importantly, books.

Unlike other online books and comics, printerpress will require the production of a physical book and involve the viewer in this books assembly, while still employing the Internet as means for its propagation. Through the utilization of the octavo signature fold and by taking into consideration the prevalence, as well as the limitations of home printing we have created the host for what we hope to be an ever growing library of these illustrated books. Books shared for free and distributed as far as the World Wide Web reaches. The reader’s printer becoming the press responsible for production.

Our books will be released as serials, chapter by chapter, on a regular basis. The reader will print each chapter separately. Each chapter will consist of a single sheet of paper. Once folded down (see the folding instructions ((link to folding instructions)) each chapter will be eight pages long, all pages printed on a single side of paper, taking into considerations the reader’s printer’s necessary margins. The assembly of these chapters will require a single cut into the paper and no adhesives or binding.
We hope to be providing free printable cases for the collection of these chapters soon.
The site will be updated on a regular basis, with new chapters, books and more. If you are interested in being notified of printerpress’ updates, or would like to get involved (link to get involved!) please contact us (Link to contact).

Get involved!

If you are an artist or writer and have an idea for a book, download our template (link to the template), get to work and then get in touch. (Link to contact) Printerpress has potential, but only if you spread the word and get involved.
Involvement is not limited to the writing and illustrating of books and chapters. Just visiting the site, reading our books and telling your friends about what we are doing can help a lot.

Teaching

Teaching is another way to help. We feel that printerpress has a lot to offer in terms of education. The simple book form utilized is easily taught to adults and children of all ages. We would be happy to upload and host the books produced as the result of any class or group, no matter what age. In fact, we encourage any teachers who are interested in utilizing this site as part of a lesson, to contact us (Link to contact) so that we can provide them with instructions and a password, so that they can upload their class' books without our help. We can also offer other ideas projects and suggest other websites and books providing book related educational information, such as the books of Paul Johnson, or the education manual offered free online at Booklyn.org.

A goal for us here at printerpress, is to provide our own lesson plan incorporating both the bookmaking and Internet related ends of the process, and we would be grateful to anyone interested in helping us put this plan together. This is just one more way to participate in and support the growth of this website. Can you imagine the sense of accomplishment that might accompany, not only the creation of a book, but the uploading of that book onto the internet, a place where it can be shared with family, friends and innumerable others?
If you have any ideas, or would like to get involved with teaching about printerpress don’t hesitate to contact us. (Link to contact)

Environment

What follows is a list of ideas to help limit the amount of waste involved in the use of this site.

1.Though our books are designed to be cheaply printed and assembled, we encourage collecting of the books rather than reading and throwing away. For this reason we have designed printable box libraries for the storing of printerpress chapters.

2.When printing it is possible to reuse paper that has already been printed on. Our chapters only require printing on a single side of a sheet of paper, and after folding, the reverse side of the paper is no longer visible. This is equally true of the libraries we offer for the collection of our books. Why not print a pinterpress chapter on the blank side of an already used piece of paper?

3. If you do decide to discard our books, please recycle.

Template

We offer templates in both US letter size and A4. It is encouraged, but not required for books to be formatted for both sizes. The template is divided into eight sections representing each of the chapter’s pages and and the direction each page faces is made apparent by the direction these page numbers face. The template is marked showing folding/ cutting lines and the location at which the average printer’s margins crop into the page. To prepare a chapter for uploading onto printerpress.org it must be saved as a pdf file, at no greater than 150dpi. The file should be flattened. There is no need to use our template, as long as the finished product is the right size and is saved in the proper format. But if you do use our template, remember to remove the page numbers and margin lines before flattening and saving your files.

Libraries

Printerpress intends to offer box libraries for the collecting of our book’s chapters. The libraries require the printing of two pages, and the use of glue in their construction. We will offer libraries for both our A4 and US Letter chapters, though each format fits relatively well in both size boxes.
In the case that you have access to a printer that can print on A3 size paper, or the US equivalent, we provide libraries formatted for printing on a single sheet of paper. They do not require the use of glue.