Show HN: Printable Classics – Free printable classic books for hobby bookbinders https://ift.tt/Awmgvut

Show HN: Printable Classics – Free printable classic books for hobby bookbinders I created a site ( https://ift.tt/uTcW9eY ) that allows you to download classic books and customize things like the font size, page size, and the cover. As part of this, I wrote a software pipeline that takes epubs, html files, or pdfs and converts them into formatted books with custom covers, page numbers, chapter formatting, etc. I used an LLM for categorizing the books. There's a nice way to filter such that you could easily find "Young Adult, Ancient, Fantasy" for example. When downloading from the site, the PDFS are rendered in a work queue. Hopefully the server I'm using won't get overwhelmed. It takes around 10-15 seconds to generate for most books. Most of the books currently on the site are from Standard Ebooks. I plan to add more books from Archive.org and Project Gutenberg over time. I also created a little guide on how you can print and bind books at home with around $200 in equipment. ( https://ift.tt/xXkjzyW ) Printable versions of the Harvard Classics are available here: https://ift.tt/ye62DzC This is an example of direct PDF conversion. Hopefully this is useful to some people. I plan to use the books here for home education myself so it will at least be useful to me. I'd like to add a guide with top suggestions by age level and some educational theory on how I made the selections. I'm happy to take any feedback on the site or answer any questions. There is also the option to have the books professionally printed through a print on demand provider. I'm hoping that could be a way to pay for the site hosting. Thanks for checking it out! https://ift.tt/uTcW9eY February 9, 2026 at 02:09AM