Family cookbook - best service to print?

May 17, 2021 3:46 PM

My mother-in-law and sister-in-law wrote a family cookbook to keep themselves sane while my husband (their son/brother) was battling late stage cancer as a teenager. He made it! The cookbooks were professionally printed, but are in short supply 36 years later. I found a pristine copy and scanned it, AWESOME! Now that I’ve got the PDF, where could you recommend getting hard copies printed? I’d like to surprise younger family members with their own copies.

We are a food family and need to keep this going!

posted by soleilMia to Food & Drink (7 answers total)

I've had good results from Staples, I really like spiral binding for a cookbook.
posted by Marky at 3:55 PM on May 17, 2021

Fed-ex printing (formerly Kinko’s) can do spiral-bound books, with a hard plastic cover. They might do other kinds of binding to, but that’s where I would start.
posted by dbmcd at 3:56 PM on May 17, 2021 [1 favorite]

If you want it to look like a real book, blurb.com does a real nice job.
posted by jonathanhughes at 4:45 PM on May 17, 2021 [3 favorites]

I recently shared my family recipes with the younger folks and just emailed them one per day, which was a pretty fun way to do it as I was able to make a comment on each recipe about my memory of it. Sounds like you have a single PDF? If you have an online file sharing service, I would recommend that route for the youngsters.
posted by Grok Lobster at 4:51 PM on May 17, 2021

Sounds like a great project and happy to hear about your husband. I had produced a self published book for a client thru Amazon. Quality was good but it was typical paperback style (gloss cover, Un coated text pages). https://kdp.amazon.com/en_US/
If you want more of a photo style hard cover book, there are plenty of resources.. shutterfly, even Apple does it. Just search photo books. I had this place bookmarked but never used them https://www.parabo.press/
Note that high quality scans are crucial. Scanning printed documents do not typically yieald great results as your text will be images, not vector based art.
posted by pmaxwell at 9:09 PM on May 17, 2021

Designer Khoi Vinh recently wrote about a similar project. He used Lulu.com.
posted by griseus at 1:34 AM on May 18, 2021

Response by poster: Thanks for the leads, this should help me get a nice, productive start!
posted by soleilMia at 6:27 AM on May 18, 2021