Wow, it has been a year since I've built this thing already? Today I updated my DIY hollow book with the lessons learned in a year.
First, it is hard to see in the picture, but I laminated all the inside surfaces and edges of the book with matte transparent plastic. It turns out that if you grab the same paper page of a book over and over again (with/without dirty hands) that eventually that page is going to turn a dirty brown. I hope the plastic will solve this (first I glued a new pretty white page in place of course)
Second, if you are going to chuck a book in your backpack daily and have it bounce around all day the edges of the (hard) cover are going to fray eventually. If I ever create a new hollow book I'm going to solve this with gaudy metal corner bits or something but I suppose some black electrician's tape will do. To properly place the tape I actually had to gut the entire book. I have a new-found respect for bookbinders.
Third, not really an update as this was in place from the start but I wanted to show how the velcro is mounted. I've minimized the amount of velcro glued to the reader to reduce the shear force when pulling it out while maintaining the gripping power needed to keep it in its place under fairly extreme circumstances. I've dropped the reader an embarrassing amount of times - it survived.
Here's to another year of reader protection!
