Printing ebook on A4 paper

Question

Thinking to print PDF format ebook onto A4 size pages, and bind up as a book.

The print outs are 2 by 2, double sided. So every A4 paper has 4 pages of the ebook.

This is the idea:

1. Split the PDF format ebook into multiple single pages (1 file becomes multiple files)
2. Reshuffle the split pages accordingly, and combine into 1 file (page orders changed)
3. Simply print out all the pages
4. Cut the print-outs in the middle
5. Bind them up as a book

When reshuffling the pages, taking a 32 pages small book as an example. 1 A4 paper have 4 pages, the numbers sequence are:

01 (first page), 02 (# of first page + 1), 31 (# of last page - 1), 32 (last page)

Eight A4 paper both sides printing of:

01, 02, 31, 32

03, 04, 29, 30

05, 06, 27, 28

07, 08, 25, 26

09, 10, 23, 24

11, 12, 21, 22

13, 14, 19, 20

15, 16, 17, 18

Will this method work?

Answer 1

would it not need to be 32, 1, 2, 31 (assuming flipping on the short edge of the A4) that way 1 and 2 will be on opposite sides of page and so will 31 and 32.

Also something else to think about is odd number of pages in the book or non multiples of 2... take 10 pages for example...

[10, 1, 2, 9]

[8, 3, 4, 7]

[6,5,?,?]

you would have 2 empty pages in the middle of the book so to counter that you'd probably need to take that into account

ALTHOUGH this isn't taking into account that you will cut the pages in the center. That would be binding in the middle

Thinking in terms of binding page by page...

Having 1 and 2 together won't really work seeing as you want them to be back to back

back to 10 example

[4, 1, 2, 3] or could be [3, 1, 2, 4] or [1, 3, 4, 2], etc. But I'd do first one to keep the cut edges at the binding side

[8, 5, 6, 7]

[?, 9, 10, ?] or [?, 10, 9, ?] or [9, ?, ?, 10] or [10, ?, ?, 9] where ? is an empty page.

Answer 2

Successful! I printed two books of each over 200 pages.

A least advantage is that I can remove the unwanted pages before printing.

It's a matter of reorganizing the pages before printing. Here is the right sequence:

Last page;   first page;     first page+1;   Last page-1
previous(up)-2;  previous(up)+2;     previous(up)+2;     previous(up)-2
...; ...; ...; ...
A; B; C; D      (last row of the pages)
A=D+1, B=C-1, C=D-1         

in numbers (taking a 228 pages pdf ebook as an example)

228 1   2   227
226 3   4   225
224 5   6   223
.   .   .   .
.   .   .   .
.   .   .   .
120 109 110 119
118 111 112 117
116 113 114 115

A picture of one of the sampled books.

Let me know if you need help when interested in this topic. :)