Regarding the difficulty of MN 1, perhaps it would be an idea to include SuttaCentral’s difficulty icons for the Long and Middle Discourses. These are the icons in the top-right corner of each long and middle discourse.
Spiral-bound books are definitely available. I just didn’t know anyone wanted them. For study and note-taking, a spiral binding with wide margins may even be best.
PDFs of the cover and the interior are attached to this message for download. Those of you who would like a spiral bound version should probably start with the interior PDF, which should be compatible with lulu’s spiral binding option. I’m less sure about the cover for a spiral binding, but a little time with Photoshop or GIMP should fix any problems in that department.
Thanks for the project! I wonder is it any future plan for other nikayas ?
I live in Indonesia, I could only download the pdf version. So I keep waiting for other nikayas PDF when they’re avialable.
general info - thebookpatch.com works as well. I’ve printed loads of PDFs into books there, and you can set up the sale to make no profit yourself for sure. I look forward to adding these to my library.
I’m dealing with some unexpected stuff at the moment, so I can’t sit down and spend much time on this project for now. I will return to it in a week or so, most likely.
In the meantime, some more replies to various matters:
My plan is three titled book sets: The Longer Discourses of the Buddha (complete), The Middle Discourses of the Buddha (complete), and then Selected Shorter Discourses of the Buddha, because the shorter ones in most cases seem like the most repetitive, and many repetitive discourses in a row wouldn’t fit what most people expect when they pick up a book. I didn’t see much value to the word “Length” in the title, so I dropped it.
The spaces between paragraphs are an artifact of the HTML, but I’ve kept them on purpose. I’d considered making the margins much smaller to allow for notes (I love writing in my books), but spaces between paragraphs also serve that function, and they’re already in place, so they’ve stayed.
Please do port these files elsewhere to publish. I went to Lulu because I’ve published some other projects there before, mostly reprinting out-of-print public domain books that I’d wanted in paper form.
If anyone produces a spiral-bound version, I’d love to hear feedback about how it went and address any potential problems in that format.
Excellent! The next volume is on its way to me now, and it should be available for buying and gifting in just a few more days, once I’ve addressed the publishing or typographic issues.
Volume 1 remains available, and Volume 3 is now underway. Copies have also been ordered as gifts to those to whom I’d promised; others may buy the books at cost by following the first link above.
And here’s the front and back of volume 2. This is the proof copy; the right hand margin of the front will be slightly more generous in the publicly available version.