PIY Books (Print It Yourself)

What are PIY Books? Print It Yourself, of course. ☺

Enjoy public domain books that we have reformatted to fit younger readers and littler hands. With just a bit of time and effort we have managed to create nice PIY books for our kids at a fraction of the price and all the convenience of a library in my home. To make the most of our reformats you will need the following:

a .PDF reader - to read the files. Need a free one? Click here.
a printer (a laser jet is most economical) - to print the files
a comb binding or other binding machine - to bind the book
a laminating machine (cool or heated is fine) - to make book covers more durable
a paper corner rounding punch if your laminating sheets don't come rounded already. This prevents o.3ml and o.5ml heat laminating sheets from snagged your skin or even your linens when you read in bed.

Why would we go through all this trouble? Simple, my kids like to read GOOD books...and lots of them. Many books in the public domain are GOOD books, all be they old, they are still good! Many titles we want are just not available from publishers yet. Also, many publishers are located in the U.S. so we Canadian folks must import everything across the border and pay duty on many foreign goods.

Are we doing this because we are cheap? By no means. It does cost money to print your own materials but what we have done in the long run is create access to more books then we could EVER afford to buy or store in our home. We constantly encourage our children to think for themselves. Many times the tools to help them do that can't be found in the average bookstore. What costs me a bit of time, gives my children the gift of knowledge.

The Twins Series by Lucy Fitch Perkins

The Dutch Twins (Grade III)

The Belgian Twins (Grade VII)

Please note: We have reformatted texts from various Public Domain resource collections on the internet. We have not altered the content of the texts but rather changed the appearances of fonts, graphics, and layouts. To find out more about e-texts, please see our collection of E-text providers in our Goodie Link Library.