The dark green Ford Aerostar minivan with a satellite attached to its roof and filled with book-making paraphernalia—laptop, printer and a desktop binding system—drove up to the parking lot at Foothill Elementary School on a June 9 afternoon. There, second- and third-grade students learned hands-on about the book-making process.

Some students said building a book was easier than they expected. It involves four basic steps: cutting printed sheets into pages, binding the left edges together, scoring the cover where it will bend in half and trimming edges to give the finished product a clean and professional look. Each student left school that day with not only knowledge, but also their own self-made copy of Alice and Wonderland and Little Bear at Work and Play.

"It was cool putting a book together," said third-grader Natalie Berg, a book enthusiast. "The idea of making a book is really neat. This isn't the kind of thing you do every day."

Antong Liu, who is also in the third grade, said he would like to make more of his favorite books so that he can bring them home and keep them on his bookshelf.

Third-grade teacher Nancy Artru said that this was a great learning experience for her students, who she said enjoy writing stories.

"Writer's workshop is the highlight of their day," she said. "Learning how a book is put together and possibly putting their own pieces into an actual book inspires them to write even more."

The Internet Bookmobile is the front end of the Internet Archive, a nonprofit organization headquartered in San Francisco that collects public domain books published before 1923 and stores them in a digital library which anyone can access and print out as many copies as they like. There are approximately 10,000 books in the archive ranging from children's classics like Alice and Wonderland and The Wizard of Oz to educational texts such as Fourth Century Buddhist Psychological Ethics and Plant Propagation. However, there are 16 million books listed in the public domain, which consists of creative works with expired copyright labels.

The archive operates by buying and collecting older books and shipping them to India, where scanning is relatively cheaper. Once the material is scanned, it is formatted to fit in a computer and uploaded to the archive's website. In exchange for their scanning services, India receives digital copies of the books.

Materials may also come from Project Gutenburg, where volunteers manually retype out-of-copyright books into the computer.

Rindsberg said there are benefits to having the Bookmobile and the Internet Archive that libraries and bookstores don't have.

"The Bookmobile is a mesh of two models," he said. "People have to return library books after a couple of weeks or pay for books at a store, but the Bookmobile gives books away for free."

The Bookmobile may also be a vehicle for new and struggling authors to publish their works. According to Rindsberg, who said he gets at least one new author each week, putting a book together using the Bookmobile's services is more economical than doing it at a copy shop.

This is a service aspiring author and third-grader Nicole Shadman said she would love to take advantage of. Shadman, who was the second runner-up at this year's Young Authors Faire, said she would like to have her creation titled The Ancient Times put into an actual book with proper binding.

To find out more about Internet Bookmobile or Internet Archive, check out http://www.archive.org/bookmobile.