The e-book revolution has crushed a lot of small publishers and made it harder to get short pressrun books published. This has caused a proliferation of subsidy publishers [seven have contacted me in the past 5 weeks] who want you to pay them to publish your book.

Now, I am an old time book geek. I have still not been completely dragged into the 21st Century kicking and screaming [No, I am smugly grousing and decrying the fall of civilization under my breath as an author should]. Ten years ago, in one of the world’s largest private libraries, I was handling a Spanish navigational atlas with hand scrawled notes placed there by returning mariners. For me that was like a date with a movie star. I have a thing for the physical nature of a book; a book as artifact. I also want to be able to reed after the apocalypse wipes out the power grid.

In the meantime, the only way I can afford to publish anything is online. So, what is a book geek to do? Let me tell you what I do. I print the thing out—killing a tree in service to my tactile sense and nostalgic sensibilities. If you pay $3 for a novelette or feature here it will cost you $2.5 dollars to print it out. Get a $1 binder at the dollar store and collect them. For my Sunset books, I print out the manuscripts of the novels single-spaced and manage to get the three or four novels in one oversized binder. Your printout cost will vary depending on your printer make and the value of the cartridge you purchase. For ease of reading I like to bind a 100-150 pages in a $1 floppy one-inch binder. They hold up better than the $2 stiff ones.

If you buy a PDF on a site, print it out, and put it in a binder, you will be spending about as much total, as you would on an equivalent trade paperback, which happens to be the part of the print market that has been hardest hit by the e-book revolution. In fact, e-readers are sized to compete with the 5 by 8 trade paperback. We are still killing the same amount of trees, but not melting down as many animals for glue. One thing you might want to consider is this: when an author gets his ‘galleys’ back from the editor so he can proofread her layout, it looks almost exactly like an un-punched unbound PDF printed out on 8 ½ by 11.

Your homemade galley-style book won’t be so pretty, but it could be read without power on a sunny day, and you will still get to turn the pages with that vestigial prehensile thumb of yours.