Turning a print-ready PDF into a book a kid can hold

What you actually have

The book comes back to the address you paid with as a PDF. Nothing is shipped, there's no tracking number and there's nothing to sign for, which is why a December order behaves differently from every other present on the list.

Two facts decide everything below. The pages are 210mm square — a shade over eight and a quarter inches — and the file belongs to you. You can print it tonight, print it again in four years when the first copy has been loved to pieces, and print a second copy for the grandparents without paying twice.

What you don't get is the decision. The same file becomes four fairly different objects, and they aren't ranked. Start from what you want to be holding on the day.

Your own printer: tonight, for the cost of ink

The fastest route is the one already in the house. Any color printer that takes letter or A4 paper can produce these pages, though not quite at full size — both sheets are narrower than 210mm once the printer's own unprintable margin comes off, so the print dialog will shrink it by a few percent. At home that's invisible, and you'll be finished inside an hour.

What you give up is the cover. Printer paper is thin, so the pages go floppy and the picture on the front creases the first time it gets carried anywhere. Two changes fix most of it: use the heaviest paper the tray will take, and print single-sided so the ink from the next page doesn't show through.

Then it needs to hold together. In rough order of how long each one survives: a three-hole punch with a ribbon threaded through, a slide binder from an office-supply store, or a clip in the corner. None of these is a book. All of them are something a four-year-old can carry to the couch, which on the right evening is the whole requirement.

This is the right route when the day is tomorrow, when the child is young enough that the object gets wrecked either way, or when you want to see the thing in your hands before deciding how to do it properly.

A copy shop: a real binding, in a day or two

The local copy shop is the step most people skip and shouldn't. Twenty-four pages is a small enough job that it's usually same-day or next-day, and it tends to cost less than the book did.

Ask for saddle-stitch. It's the binding a school program or a thin magazine uses — the sheets are folded down the middle and stapled through the fold — and twenty-four pages is exactly the count it's meant for. It lies flatter than anything you can manage at home, which matters when two people are reading it at once.

The alternative is coil binding, where a plastic spiral runs down the spine. It's less handsome and it opens completely flat, which for a child who wants to put a finger on the picture is arguably the better trade.

Either way, ask for a heavier stock on the outer sheet than the inside ones. That single change is most of the distance between a stack of paper and something that reads as a book.

A print-on-demand service: closest to a bookstore book

If you want an object that will still be on a shelf in ten years, use a print-on-demand or photo-book service — the sort of company that prints wedding albums and self-published paperbacks. You upload the file, choose a binding, and a bound copy arrives in the post.

Check two things before you pay. The first is shape: our pages are square, and plenty of services only offer portrait and landscape. Look for a square format, and if the nearest one is 8 by 8 inches rather than 210mm, that's about a quarter of an inch of difference — measurable, and invisible on a shelf.

The second is time. This is the only route on the page that ships, so the carrier deadline you avoided by buying a file comes straight back. In December that's the difference between a present and an apology.

The upside is that it's the only route where the result looks like a book somebody bought. For a present sent from a distance, where you won't be in the room when it's opened, that's often the entire point.

Leaving it on a screen: not a failure

Keeping it as a file is a real answer, and worth saying out loud, because pages like this one tend to assume paper is the goal.

A tablet lying flat between two people works about as well as a hardcover for reading aloud, and the pictures are lit from behind, which small children notice and like. It also can't be torn, lost, or left at somebody's house, and two children in two places can read it at the same time.

What you lose is the unwrapping. If the book is the present rather than an extra, print something — even the ribbon-and-hole-punch version — so there's an object on the day, and keep the file for the reading.

What to say when you hand the file over

If you've never given a file to a print shop, the conversation is shorter than you'd expect. Four things cover it.

• The size. 210mm square, or eight and a quarter inches. Ask them not to scale it to fit a standard page — scaling is the one thing that visibly crops the illustrations.
• The paper. The heaviest they'll run in color for the inside pages, something heavier again for the outer sheet.
• The binding. Saddle-stitch if you want it to look like a book, coil if you want it to lie flat.
• The count. Twenty-four pages, cover included.

If they ask for something that isn't on that list — bleed, a color profile, single pages rather than spreads — send us the question before you pay them. We'd rather answer it than have you guess, and it costs you an email.

Where printing lands in the calendar

Printing is a second lead time stacked on the first, and it's the one people forget when they count backwards from a date.

The book itself takes 7 business days from the day your photos reach us. Everything on this page happens after that. Printing at home adds an evening. A copy shop adds a day or two. A print-on-demand service adds a week or more, most of it in transit.

So work backwards twice: once for us, once for whoever prints it. If the answer comes out short, the home-printer version on the night before is a genuine option rather than a consolation prize — the guide sorted by days remaining covers what else is still open at that range.

None of this expires. The file sits in your inbox, so a copy you didn't have time to print properly in December is still there in February, when the shops are quiet and nobody is waiting.

How ordering works

Three steps, and the first two are done before you close the tab — nothing to install, nothing to post.

• You pay $9.99 and tell us the child's name, age and whatever you want in the story on the payment page.
• You upload two or three photos of them on the page you land on straight after checkout — pick the files and you're done, no email to write. Prefer email? Send them to info@kater.jp from the address you paid with instead.
• The finished book comes back to the address you paid with as a print-ready PDF within 7 business days. If we miss that, you get a full refund without asking.

One thing worth knowing before you count backwards from a date: we're in Japan, so business days here are Japanese weekdays. Weekends and Japanese public holidays don't count, and they don't fall on the same days as yours. How the 7 days are counted is written out on the refund page. If your date is tight, email us before you pay and we'll tell you whether it fits.

Related pages

If you already know the occasion

• A Christmas present that can't get stuck in shipping — How the timing works with no carrier involved, and what to do when it's already late
• A present from grandparents who live too far to guess — The three questions to ask the parents, and how to read it together from far away

More guides

• What personalized means — Name-swap, template and written-for-one-kid compared, and how to tell which you're buying
• Buying an AI-made book — Six questions worth asking any seller of AI-made books, with our answers beside them
• Last-minute gifts — What still works at two weeks, at one week, and on the night before
• Gifts by age — Age by age from 3 to 8: what shifts, and where a picture book fits
• What to write inside — Six inscriptions, what makes each one work, and where to put them
• When they have everything — Sorted by the constraint each idea respects: space, noise, screen time, duplication
• Reading it together — What the first read is like, why the tenth matters more, and what to say if they ask who made it
• All occasions — who people buy these for, one page each