Just to offer an old-school solution, you could always print and bind it yourself! Yeah, there's lots of services which can print on demand these days, but when I printed a book for a friend, they were not around.
Whether you want to go through the effort to print and bind it yourself is really a matter of how you feel about the physical object you end up with. Obviously doing the work yourself will put more significance on the physical object. Whether it is worth the effort is up to you. I still smile when I see it on my shelf.
The process I went through was:
- I typeset the document using LaTeX. LaTeX gives superior text layout to any other tool you might use like Word. It's got a learning curve that's pretty brutal, but I already had experience with it. I used MikTEX, which was an easy to use packaged version of LaTeX. I used this to get all of the details like page numbers and chapter titles right. I typeset it for a half page (5.5"x8.5"), which matters for the binding process, and had to spend some time getting the margins right.
- I printed the pages on a duplex-capable printer. I have one at home, but you could go to any print place and get them. There is a correct order to print the pages so that, if you take 4 sheets of paper, and fold them in half, the result is 8 half sheets in the correct order (double sided, so 16 pages of your manuscript printed on those 4 sheets), called a "signature"
- Print and fold all of these.
- Bind the book together using a saddle stitch.
This takes much more time than having a publishing house print it for you, but the memory does last better. I smile when I look at the book, even though the work is amateurish at best!
Here's pictures of the one I kept. I chose not to finish the covers on this copy, so that you can see what it looks like on the inside of a hardcover book. Book contents photographed with author's permission.
