bookbinding and conversation

written 14 March 2025

• I first learned how to bookbind from this wonderful YouTube video by Jess Less: Turning Fanfiction Into the Hardcover Book it Deserves.
• This blog post has a list of really good pdf-to-book-format converters. (because if you think about how a book is bound, with multiple sets of paper ("signatures"), it doesn't make sense to just take a book pdf as-is and just print that). Jess used Adobe Acrobat, but I hate that software, so slow to load D: I now use bookbinder-js. Careful, doesn't seem to download output files on Firefox! :0
• pagedjs.org is a... uh... "JavaScript library that paginates content in the browser to create PDF output from any HTML content. This means you can design works for print (eg. books) using HTML and CSS!" Yeah, that. I was googling for bookbinder-js because I didn't want to endorse Adobe Acrobat, but found this on the way.

Topic switch: I have a friend who's really into meta conversation (i.e. they converse about conversation often (isn't meta a fun word and concept? see: wikipedia or stackoverflow meta pages)). They make me want to be better at conversing. So, I found this reddit post aggregating some apparently good books on the topic. In that post is this other blog post from socialself.com that has another list. I've been looking at that second list. In particular, Conversationally Speaking by Alan Garner is REALLY GOOD! It reads like a textbook, so I'm right at home. socialself's blog post ITSELF is also really really good. Each book on the list is accompanied by a summary of its contents and themes that might draw you to or turn you away from a book.

On top of Conversationally Speaking ( ISBN-10 9781565656291 ), I'll hopefully be looking into these:

• How to speak, how to listen ( ISBN-10 9780684846477 )
• The fine art of small talk: how to start a conversation in any situation ( ISBN-10 1401302262 )
• power questions build relationships, win new business, and influence others ( ISBN-10 1118119630 )
• If I Understood You, Would I Have This Look on My Face? ( ISBN-10 9780812989151 )

2007 Called, They Want Their Jeans Back is really fun and emoish.