How Book Folks Can Save 20% on Paper Costs at Home

Booksellers and Book Readers Love to Print Out Stuff

by Paul Hunt

Book people like printed stuff.  They usually read real books and don’t like reading too much material on a computer screen.  I know that a lot of us will print out an article from the internet and read it from paper rather than trying to read it on a computer, tablet, and especially a cel phone.

The rub is that we use a lot of paper.  I have found that if I print out an article, not only can I read it later, but I can save it for reference and actually find it instead of trying to find it on the computer as a cryptic .pdf file.  I also noticed that almost every article I print out has wasted or mostly blank pages at the beginning or the end.  Part of this is caused by scaling from various website design software.  Also, many articles have comments at the end of the article, or ads, or just blank sheets.

So here’s the tip:  Before you hit the final “Print” button, look at the preview.  In a 7 page story there might be 2 blank pages, so select only the pages that are necessary for the article.  You can usually ditch the comments and the bottom ads and jibberish. Then instead of the default “Print All”, type into the magic box only the pages that you want to print, like “1-5”.   I have found that I save at least 20% of paper use by doing this. You will have more money to buy more books!!

Bonus Tip  Most of us have noticed that printers are cheap, but the ink is expensive.  The printer companies will almost force their way into your home, hold you hostage, and brazenly install an ink jet printer to your computer so that you will then be their economic slave for eternity and have to buy their overpriced ink cartridges. For years I have used a system that hooks up larger ink tanks to my Epson printer, allowing me to buy ink cheaply in large bottles.  This has saved me thousands of dollars over the years, but it is a bootleg system and does have it’s annoyances.  Now Epson has come out with an actual “Eco-Tank” system that will save you a fortune in ink.  It has built in ink tanks so no more little plastic cartridges that are so over-priced.  The Epson printers are great quality and are very reasonable, so I recommend the Eco-Tank to save you even more money.  I bought mine from Amazon because it was the cheapest deal and even though they said it would take 5-7 days, I ordered it on Saturday and it arrived Monday morning.  Their price was better that Target, Best Buy, Walmart, and all the rest. Happy Printing Book Folks.