What to Do With Your Book PDF (Six Options, Ranked by Effort)
Your book arrives as a print-ready PDF: thirteen illustrated pages, 300 DPI, 8.5 inches square. That is a deliberately flexible format, because what people want to do with it varies enormously.
Six options, from least effort to most.
1. Read it on a tablet tonight
Zero effort, zero cost, and genuinely fine. Open the PDF full-screen and swipe. For a bedtime tonight, this is the whole product.
The obvious limitation is that a tablet at bedtime is a trade some households will not want to make. Worth knowing it is available rather than assuming you have to print first.
2. Print it at home, plain paper
Thirteen sheets on whatever is in the printer. Costs pennies, looks like what it is, and small children do not care even slightly.
Print single-sided and staple down the left edge. Do not attempt double-sided unless your printer is reliable about it, because a misaligned duplex job wastes the whole run.
3. Print at home on decent card
The upgrade that gives the biggest return for the least money. Matte photo paper or 160-200gsm card, single-sided, and it stops feeling like a printout.
Set the printer to "best" or "photo" quality and turn off any auto-scaling: choose "actual size" rather than "fit to page", or you will get a white margin that crops the illustrations.
4. Print shop, spiral bound
Any high-street print shop will do thirteen colour pages and a spiral or comb bind while you wait. It is usually the cheapest way to get something that opens flat and survives being carried around.
Ask for card stock and a clear acetate cover. It lies flat on a lap, which matters more than it sounds when you are reading to a child.
5. Photo book upload
The PDF pages can be uploaded to most photo book services as images. This gets you a properly bound book with a printed cover, and the square format fits their standard sizes well.
Turn off any auto-enhance or auto-crop the service offers. These are illustrations, not photographs, and "enhancement" will do them no favours.
6. Order the hardcover
We print and ship a proper hardcover for $44.99. It is the version that gets kept, and the one worth writing an inscription in.
If it is a gift and it needs to feel like a gift, this is the option. If it is for your own child and it needs to survive being read every night, this is also the option. Everything above is better value for anything else.
One thing to do regardless
Save the PDF somewhere that is not just your downloads folder. Email it to yourself, put it in cloud storage, whatever you actually use. Your download link does not last forever, and this is the sort of file people go looking for years later.