Printable Classics

Details

External ID

46944365

Source

HN

Company

—

Product

Printable Classics

Website domain

printableclassics.com

Launched

Feb. 9, 2026

Cohort

—

Upvotes

85

Upvotes percentile

0.876010781671159

Tags

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Fetched at

Sept. 7, 2026, 9:26 p.m.

Updated at

Sept. 7, 2026, 9:26 p.m.

Description

I created a site (https://printableclassics.com) that allows you to download classic books and customize things like the font size, page size, and the cover.As part of this, I wrote a software pipeline that takes epubs, html files, or pdfs and converts them into formatted books with custom covers, page numbers, chapter formatting, etc.I used an LLM for categorizing the books. There's a nice way to filter such that you could easily find "Young Adult, Ancient, Fantasy" for example.When downloading from the site, the PDFS are rendered in a work queue. Hopefully the server I'm using won't get overwhelmed. It takes around 10-15 seconds to generate for most books.Most of the books currently on the site are from Standard Ebooks. I plan to add more books from Archive.org and Project Gutenberg over time.I also created a little guide on how you can print and bind books at home with around $200 in equipment. (https://printableclassics.com/print-guide)Printable versions of the Harvard Classics are available here: https://printableclassics.com/harvard_classics This is an example of direct PDF conversion.Hopefully this is useful to some people. I plan to use the books here for home education myself so it will at least be useful to me. I'd like to add a guide with top suggestions by age level and some educational theory on how I made the selections. I'm happy to take any feedback on the site or answer any questions.There is also the option to have the books professionally printed through a print on demand provider. I'm hoping that could be a way to pay for the site hosting.Thanks for checking it out!

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