After starting to reread my 6th edition copy of How Parliament Works over the weekend, which is now notably dated, I had a quick poke around Amazon looking to see whether there’s a more recent edition (there is…). In doing so, I saw various mentions to historical “Standing Orders of the House of Commons“. A quick search of the Parliament website turned up an appropriate page, and a link to a PDF of the 2016 orders.
Having a print copy of such a document to leave laying around means I’ll able to start to pick up stuff from it using osmotic reading(?!;-), but I couldn’t find anywhere to buy such a copy. And printing it out on looseleaf A4 is way too much like faffing around.
However, it seems that on the one hand Parliamentary licensing is quite liberal (the Open Parliament License), and on the other, no-one would know anyway if I uploaded the PDF and got it printed on-demand, in bound copy, private access style, from Lulu:
With a two or three quid for postage, that comes in at less than the “cover price” of £10 too.
Which got me thinking… maybe I should try to find some other reference material to bundle into the “book” too? The additional page charge for another couple of hundred pages makes no difference to the marginal cost of the postage etc…
(Unfortunately, Parliament doesn’t distribute an electronic copy of Erskine May. Instead, you need a library, or several hundred quid to give to Lexis Nexis.)
It’s a shame Lulu closed their API down, too… that could have been a useful way of eg auto-generating some POD/book printed copies of report and consultation document readings that I typically open into tabs and then never read. (Osmotic reading of long form content through a screen is something I still struggle to do…)
PS If you’ve never tried a Lulu book before, here’s one I prepared earlier… ;-)
OUseful.Info, the blog... 