NCERT publishes a series of additional material to their text books called, Exemplar Problems. They provide this for Maths and Science subjects from Class VI to XII. This is really valuable for preparing for the exams and are used by both kids and teachers.
Unfortunately, the website provides only individual PDF files for each chapter. Also, the PDF file is a pre-production version with paper size markings which increases the page size.
All of these make it difficult to read on a small ereader and the kids get another reason to use the computer and eventually get distracted by the umpteen games and Youtube videos that can also be accessed from there.
I needed a way to combine the individual PDFs into a single file and also crop the pages. There are a number of ways of doing this, but after a few trial and errors, I settled on the excellent PDF Arranger tool. I also did a print to PDF as a final step on my Gnome desktop and selected the option to 'fit to page', so that, all the pages have the standard A4 size, instead of the cropped sizes.
I had the final PDF now, which I loaded onto my Kindle. The text was readable, but it was still a subpar experience. My 7th Gen Kindle, bought in 2015 was showing its age.
So I ended up creating A5 size books by imposing two of the original pages on an A4 paper using the Book Binder tool. I used the chain stitch that is explained in this video.
With some additional help from a few scraps of card board, an old jeans, a chart paper and Fevicol, I now had a decent book whose binding was way better than commercially produced books, because the book can be laid flat due to using small bundles of pages that are stitched together called Signature. The papers also stay put for a long time, unlike the Perfect bound cheap paper backs, whose bindings fail after a few years and pages fall off randomly.
See it here in all its glory.
The book with pages opened flat.
I had previously made similar hand bound books for Discourses by Epictetus and a fiction written by my friend called The Archer's Revenge. I was happy that I could use this new found hobby of mine in a more conventional way.
Here are the PDF versions of the book in case you woudl find it useful: