PDF?No thanks.

Postscript please!

First, a little background on me...

(Might explain why I'm a little obsessed)

How do you preserve access to a Word95 .doc?

How do you preserve access to the game 'Lemmings'?

You are affected by the format and medium in which the information

is in...

Faithful representation?

Or migrated to the most useful or most expected form?

http://www.pepysdiary.com/

http://walterocner.wordpress.com/2009/05/05/some-

thoughts-about-jack-kerouac-and-on-the-road/

How does the reading experience differ from the book version?

Aha! A book I can format-shift!

A Citizen CBM-1000 till printer! (skip to the end....)

But how do you make a normal book by hand

from a digital file?

http://www.reuels.com/reuels/Book_Binding_Instruction.html

Now, turn your document into a postscript file.

No PDFs beyond this point!

Eg “pdf2ps myfile.pdf mybetterfile.ps”

Why no PDFs?

The tools to manipulate them are not good or 'rare'.

And the horrific nature of how PDF stores text doesn't help either.

psselect -p_,_,-,_,_ infile.ps outfile.ps

Again, from psutils – psbook

psbook -s16 infile.ps outfile.ps

Print-time! – setup the printer to print two pages per A4 sheet and

duplex.

You may wish to combine the page pairs onto single sheets...

how? Again, psutils to the rescue!

pstops '2:0L@0.6(20cm,2cm)+1L@0.6(20cm,15cm)' infile.ps

dualpages.ps

psnup -2 dualpages.ps combo.ps

Er, what?See → http://bit.ly/cDwzcp

... 0L ....

0L@0.6(20cm,2cm)

… 1L ....

1L@0.6(20cm,15cm)

Bookbinding tools

Ebooks... easier to carry, faster to get, looks like a book.

Will the make the book irrelevant?

No.

They make books and paper goods even more

special .

What should we do with the redundant

books then?

Brian Dettmer

Georgia Russell

Thank you for your time!

I'm Ben O'Steen, @benosteen, and even bosteen@gmail.com

The Citizen CBM-1000 till printer!

Would printing 'receipts' help visualise

the cost?

(credit to @davechallis for the idea)

And how about printing a twitter

timeline?

The #dev8d tweetstream