I don’t think necessity is the mother of invention - invention, in my opinion, arises directly from idleness, possibly also from laziness. To save oneself trouble.

- Agatha Christie, An Autobiography, 1977

The above quote definitely applies to me - not to say that I am an inventor but rather someone who is always hunting down new solutions just because I don’t want to go through the headache of using current solutions. In a way that is what much of Information Technology is about - enabling people through more efficient solutions.

Last Tuesday, in a retreat planning meeting, I was tasked with printing a PDF on Holy Week, it was simply a 50 page document that we needed 120 copies of in book format. Traditionally we would just run it down to the local office supply store or quick print shop, but my experience is that the process is a lot of headache, not that cheap and the end product isn’t impressive. Wanting to avoid the headache, I started searching on the net and found several printers that will publish a PDF into a book.

I stumbled onto 48HrBooks.com, they looked like a good fit for what we wanted to do and great prices. We could get 125 “Perfect Bound” (paperback) books printed for $2.19 each. After checking that they were legit, I reformatted the document for 5.5″x8.5″ and uploaded it to them. The following day, they sent me an email asking to approve a proof of the color cover online and that was it - the books were shipped two days later. We received the books yesterday and they came out great - much nicer (and cheaper) than the spiral bound option we would have gone with if we used the local suppliers.