Last week the new Bookimobile took to the road. It’s a van that has everything inside to produce books, a mobile book production lab and powered by Booki!
Bookimobile in Barcelona
The van is a VW T4 and has the following equipment:
Fastback 15XS Binder
Ideal electric paper guillotine
Samsung 2851 ND duplex black and white laser printer + ink
IP4000 color inkjet
Heaps of paper (A4)
Card for covers
Scissors, rulers, paper knives, cutting boards etc
Power cables, extension boards etc
With all this, you can make books!
The idea is based on the Internet Archives Book Mobile. We pretty much stole the idea from them (we asked first 😉 and loaded the van with everything needed to make books and drove it on its first outing 2000km from Berlin to Barcelona. It was a long haul.
The process of making the books takes some time to refine but we learned a tremendous amount. In short, the process runs like this:
- create a book in Booki (we used existing books)
- output A5 book-formatted PDF from Booki
- print the PDF as a ‘booklet’ using the duplex (for double-sided printing) printer
- cut the book to size using the paper cutter
- bind the spine using the Fastback 15XS
- print the cover
- work out where to crease the spine to wrap nicely around the contents
- add the cover to the contents (it adheres with the binding spines we use for the fastback)
- trim the book nice and tight with the cutter
That’s it! Once printed, the procedure takes about 5 minutes and the total cost for a 100-page book is less than a Euro. The books look great!
Freshly cut book
The Bookimobile is designed to take book production to the world. With Booki and the equipment, it’s possible to go to schools, events, festivals, streets and make free books…
Booki User Guide
We will document more of this shortly on the blog and talk more about the Bookimobile and the process of producing books. We will also work on Booki to help the production of books using home or office duplex printers.
The Bookimobile is sponsored by Organisation Internationale de la Francophonie, Mozilla, iCommons, CiviCRM and the Internet Archive. Many thanks to these organisations for making this possible.
