Paperback SE Reference Manual 1

Bookspaz.... a man after my own heart.

1) In the past, I've reinforced the corners with electrical tape folded into place like 13th century Japanese origami. This preserves the book effectively but makes for one butt ugly looking book shelf. It also telegraphs my particular brand of crazy to the villagers.

2) Nowadays, whenever possible, I find a PDF copy on the dark web to augment my hardcopy and accept that my hardcopy is, in large measure, disposable. Unfortunately, it requires an act of will for me to not love a book.

dl said:

I have considered taking it to a paper (book?) place and paying them to bind it for me.

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That's next level gonzo, truly. You should engage the services of a therapist.

LOL Koot. Well I tend to go pretty hard on my books. My aging steel manual is evidence of this It has no front cover and several pages stapled back into it. The hardcover was twice as much so I guess Ill figure out how to live with this. I can't find a darkweb version with the correct edition unfortunately.

Had a friend a long time ago that would only open a book about 2 inches and read it like that so she wouldn't crease the spine. Last I heard she got her Master's in Library Science. I'm not that bad, but I did almost tear up when the front cover finally fell off of my ASCE 7-10 last week.

Your PE Reference Manual is bound, right? Just with a paperback cover rather than hard? If so, I'm not sure how well the re-binding would go. Best bet is probably to be careful with it. Unless you wanted to go get some thin, corrugated plastic sheeting from your local hardware store and glue it to the cover. Though that feels a bit like sacrilege.

Drill 3 holes and stick it in a binder?

I’ve resorted to duct tape binding on more than a few occasions.

Swing by your local library and see what they recommend, they deal with this stuff all the time.

If you can swing the expense this is another solid reference book: Link

I'm making a thing: (It's no Kootware and it will probably break but it's alive!)

if you have these plastic glued/sheet it will save your textbook
they should be available in local stores

If you have a Kinkos/Fed-Ex in your area, then they can cut the binding off the paperback. I've had it done several times so that I can then scan a book to PDF. (Thanks ACI for not letting us print your PDFs..but I digress)

Officially Fed-Ex charges a few dollars for the service, but often they will do it for free. It only takes them a minute to do.

Once the binding is chopped off, you can 3-hole punch and put in a binder. (sometimes the 3-holes are in the text portion of the page though)

Joel, I promise I've never done this and this certainly is not advise to do it, but you can fairly easily write a macro that will flip through all 1200 pages and screenshot each one, then combine all the images back into a pdf. The quality is much better then scanning a hardcopy.

DRM is pointless and just annoying your customers. You can't stop a motivated person from getting around it.

-JA
try [link calcs.app]Calcs.app[/url] and let me know what you think

what kind of magic macro has the ability to flip pages? Do you have a robot @Sonofatkins??

I believe his macro was in reply to ACI not allowing printing of their documents.

Oops, yea I was replying to Joel buying a hardcopy just to chop it up and scan it. A physical page flipper would be a great feat of engineering, though.

-JA
try [link calcs.app]Calcs.app[/url] and let me know what you think

There are book page flippers - OK - there are a lot of negative reviews, but still, they exist.

Ahh - here's a better (non-commercial) one -
I don't like the typical results of scanning/digitizing.

The problem is that pages aren't opaque, so simply scanning them in the book means that light that passes through the paper to be reflected back by the next page is stopped where the ink is on the reverse side, leading to print-through. One needs to insert a black paper sheet between pages to absorb the light that is not stopped by the ink from reflecting back to match where the ink is and stop the print-through.

Scanners usually use white backing to keep the edges of the pages from having black borders as a hold-over from copiers that dealt poorly with black toner all the way to the edge of the page. This makes the print-through worse.

If a black paper is used it's easy to crop or flood fill the borders to eliminate the black boundary.

I would be surprised if Kinkos would scan it as that is a copyright violation.

10 pages a day and the job is done in 3-4 months.

I don't want to hijack driftlimiter's post...but on some of smaller ACI documents; I have purchased a hardcopy. I get Kinkos to chop the spine off. I then scan the documents into a new PDF. The quality level definitely goes down; and the document is not searchable. The scanned document then gets used by me and a few other engineers in my immediate work group.

I realized it's a copyright infringement, but I still sleep at night. I'm not selling the documents; and with current levels of prison over-crowding; I feel I would do minimal jail time if caught.

I also pay thousands of dollars a year in ACI, ASCE, AISC, AWC, CRSI etc. etc. membership fees. There's only so much a person can do.

Sorry for the derailment here driftlimiter, but jeez guys. Scanning in pages? Page flipper and screenshotter macros?
Not sure where I got my copies of ACI 318, etc, but it's unlocked and printable. Ditto for all my other pdf codes. That said - and I'm not encouraging anyone to do so, or implying that I have done so before - but there is free software (and websites - sketchy or otherwise) that will unlock pdfs. I better not post any links but just google "pdf unlocker" or something to that effect. I sometimes use this to remove protections from shop drawings so I can mark them up, which is totally above board!

Thanks for all variety of input here guys. Glad to breed a good discussion about books in the modern age .

I've decided to just rough it for now and see how it goes. Frankly I think its an atrocity to go and have Kinkos cut my brand new book, although I do think this is probably the best solution to my problem.