Technology has advanced at an incredible rate in the past decade and with it has followed problems which will have to be addressed. Two such developments are the issues of copy right laws and printing E-Books transmitted over the Internet. Small cottage industries have begun to blossom all over the world with offers to show you how to grow bigger roses, find hidden gold and where to locate your long lost relative. Each of these instructional booklets are distributed through the Internet and the digital signal is sent to your personal computer to be downloaded and eventually printed. Welcome to the wonderful age of electronic information distribution. You are able to read off your screen everything you have ever wanted and in due time, you realize that you would prefer printing this material out so that you could store a hard copy for your future reference. Page after page shoots from your printer as your valuable information is printed. What a wonderful world this is. Then comes the problem. How can I bind these many pages into a conventional book?
Possibilities for combining pages into a book
- Staple pages together- For any more than a half-dozen pages, this is very impractical.
- Paper clip together- same problem
- Punch and attach plastic hinged binder- Best way to combine pages in consecutive order. The problem with this approach is that the equipment to punch the appropriate holes is expensive as is the plastic, hinged binders. One solution has been to take your material to a printing shop and have them do the work. Again, this is also expensive and in some cases, stores have been refusing to do the work on E-Books because of the possibility of copyright law infringement. One such chain of stores is Staples Office Supplies. Many people have tried and found that it is a store policy to refuse material distributed through the Internet which could be copyright protected and they have been requiring written permission from the original author to bind this material.
- Punch holes for inserting into a three ring binder. This is a great way to store your pages but every other page would be blank.
Possible solution to you dilemma
Combining material into a handy and easily accessible format became a problem for our trumpet ensemble and after several months fighting the problem, we came up with a workable solution. Because of the fact that many of our arrangements were two pages in length, and would need to be shuffled in different order, we decided to place them in three ring binders. This gave our music all the protection needed and looked professional on the stage. Once the order had been decided for the next concert, all of the arrangements were arranged in order and once on stage, the concert program was taken out and placed on the stand to perform. There was little chance of losing pages and once the concert was over, back into the binder went the music. This has worked out for our music very well but you might ask, “How can I use this concept for storing an E-Book”?
Solution to the blank page problem
As I stated before, our music is printed on one side for easier reading at a concert. Double sheets require that both sides be visible, for turning pages is not practical in our situation. If you want printing on both sides of each page for your E-Book, this will require that you set the printer up to print in this fashion.
If you have already printed your material on just one side of your paper, then you can follow the same steps we use to store our single sided arrangements.
- Place page one and two in front of you.
- Tear off about two inches of masking tape and tape the two pages together in the center of the pages.
- Flip the pages over and place two more two inch sections of tape on the back but this time place one section of tape an inch down from the top and the second one inch from the bottom.
- With page one and page two taped together, close and place the left side of page one in a three hole punch and have at it. Then fit these pages into the left side of your new three ring binder and continue with the rest of your material.
We have used this procedure for more than three years now and have not had any issues with the tape in any way. Placing three pieces of tape at three different locations gives the binding strength and still does not cause the pages to bind together at the hinge.
Your final step would be to print a label for the cover as well as the end of the folder so as to make selection easy when you search on your shelf for your book.
