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I have the Fujitsu ScanSnap scanner mentioned in this article. That thing is amazing and oddly addicting. It really makes you want to scan everything in site. I

I have the Fujitsu ScanSnap scanner mentioned in this article. That thing is amazing and oddly addicting. It really makes you want to scan everything in site. I suspect that's what is really going on here. Professor Halavais has run out of loose papers and receipts to scan and has resorted to tearing pages out of his books. ;)

wyclif 16y ago
I submitted this story because I have somewhere approaching 3000 books in a spare room that serves as my study, none of them scanned. Even though I enjoy having them displayed on shelves I've noticed lately that this may be the numeric point where being a bibliophile becomes painful; it's beginning to hurt my goals surrounding simplifying my ownership of dead tree pulp. The potential of having my library in digital format and searchable is pretty exciting. It is a major burden to move that number of books when necessary. As for the Fujitsu ScanSnap, I saw it recommended by the folks at 37 Signals (DHH?) and looked it up and saw that it has 20ppm colour scanning and good document feeding. Doing what is recommended in this article is very time consuming to begin with, but made even more difficult since you're depending on Adobe. Like the author, I cringe at the thought of destroying perfectly good out-of-print hardbacks. I'd really love to start a business around electronic books and archiving.
- wazoox 16y ago
  > I've noticed lately that this may be the numeric point where being a bibliophile becomes painful I've noticed that too, because when you start to stack two ranks of books on every shelf, there simply isn't any way to sort them in any reasonable manner, so it became an unsearchable nightmare many years ago. Now it's getting worse, because books (and CDs, and DVDs) pile up in boxes in front of the shelves, because all available walls are already covered. Every time I look for a particular book (or CD, or DVD) I know I may very well spend a full hour doing so. Pain.
- jseliger 16y ago
  Even though I enjoy having them on shelves I've noticed lately that this may be the numeric point where being a bibliophile becomes painful; it's beginning to hurt my goals surrounding simplifying my ownership of dead tree pulp This was definitely on my mind when I posted about the Kindle: http://jseliger.com/2010/09/29/the-last-word-on-this-version-of-the-amazon-kindle http://jseliger.com/2010/09/29/the-last-word-on-this-version... . I only have about ~1,000 books, but it's easy for me to see that at some point I'll have more books than space, and I don't want to get more space than books. Still, I probably have at least 100 that I could discard with little loss, and I've become much choosier about buying and keeping nonfiction because so much of it is only worth reading once. And I've become choosier about not keeping fiction I don't love. Still, I'd use something like this: http://www.diybookscanner.org/ http://www.diybookscanner.org/ over the Snapscan.
  - deleted 16y ago
    [deleted]
  - mechanical_fish 16y ago
    Speaking as someone who has come to all the same conclusions as the professor in the original article, and who is almost literally standing over his bookshelf, drumming his fingers on the saw and trying to convince himself to try using it... ... the DIY book scanner is indeed tempting. But the payoff is so lousy. From what I can see, you'll tinker and tinker with the DIY scanner just to get it to keep the pages in focus and well illuminated, and to get the software workflow pieced together. Then, because you probably don't have a big budget or a machine shop, you won't get a robot that turns the pages, even an imperfect one that skips pages and occasionally mangles a book. ;) You'll have to turn the pages yourself, by hand. That labor all by itself is more expensive then 90% of my books. Meanwhile, the Scansnap is the real thing. My favorite piece of tech gear in years. It just works. The images come out nice. My magazine pages fit perfectly on the iPad screen. Google has done all the hard work, of course, robotics, professional book-handlers, and all. Pity that I can't access most of the fruits of that. So at some point you just have to try and convince yourself that it is no longer 1500 and printed books are a cheap commodity. As the article points out: Publishers routinely destroy printed books. They're just ink and paper. Even most of the books you think of as priceless collectibles are not particularly priceless. The really expensive part of an out-of-print book is the ability to read the words. If you want to decorate a room in beautifully bound old books, any old book will do. And, thanks to the economics of publishing, most of my really hard-to-find out-of-print books are old trade paperbacks printed on cheap paper. It will be a challenge to preserve these books through my lifetime anyway. Rather than wait until the things age and fall apart, I might as well take them apart myself. And this is how I argue to myself. But still, it's hard to bring myself to use that saw. What we need is a market in sawn-up books. Just rent a copy of your rare book that's already unbound and ready for scanning. Sell it on to someone else when you're done with it. Then you can keep the original rare book (in storage, somewhere upstate) but read the text whenever you want. The fact that this (AFAIK; IANAL) is legal but simply Bittorrenting a book you don't own is not is a very clear example of the brokenness of our legal system.
- dustyreagan 16y ago
  Something to consider if you started a digital book archiving business. Your clients would probably want their original books intact after digitizing. You'd probably need a device like Google uses that turns pages, rather than the ScanSnap approach. Might be justifiable to invest in building such a device since you'd like to digitize (and preserve) your own sizable collection. If the price is < buying a digital copy (if it even exists) of all your books, then build. Get a few clients, and recoup the costs. I'm sure there's copyright issues to deal with as soon as money changes hands too. Probably something you could work around though. Perhaps you could simply rent the machine out by the hour. Have your client sign a liability waver, and be on your way. :) Or heck, make it work like a coin-op copying machine.
  - mhb 16y ago
    What if the client sent you his book, but you scanned an already cut-up copy of the book that you have in inventory? After the scanning is done, you send the client's book back intact.
- sandGorgon 16y ago
  You could use DJVU (arguably better than PDF for scanning books - supports OCR). There are a couple of scanning solutions for DJVU format.

wyclif 16y ago

I submitted this story because I have somewhere approaching 3000 books in a spare room that serves as my study, none of them scanned. Even though I enjoy having them displayed on shelves I've noticed lately that this may be the numeric point where being a bibliophile becomes painful; it's beginning to hurt my goals surrounding simplifying my ownership of dead tree pulp. The potential of having my library in digital format and searchable is pretty exciting. It is a major burden to move that number of books when necessary. As for the Fujitsu ScanSnap, I saw it recommended by the folks at 37 Signals (DHH?) and looked it up and saw that it has 20ppm colour scanning and good document feeding. Doing what is recommended in this article is very time consuming to begin with, but made even more difficult since you're depending on Adobe. Like the author, I cringe at the thought of destroying perfectly good out-of-print hardbacks. I'd really love to start a business around electronic books and archiving.

wazoox 16y ago
> I've noticed lately that this may be the numeric point where being a bibliophile becomes painful I've noticed that too, because when you start to stack two ranks of books on every shelf, there simply isn't any way to sort them in any reasonable manner, so it became an unsearchable nightmare many years ago. Now it's getting worse, because books (and CDs, and DVDs) pile up in boxes in front of the shelves, because all available walls are already covered. Every time I look for a particular book (or CD, or DVD) I know I may very well spend a full hour doing so. Pain.
jseliger 16y ago
Even though I enjoy having them on shelves I've noticed lately that this may be the numeric point where being a bibliophile becomes painful; it's beginning to hurt my goals surrounding simplifying my ownership of dead tree pulp This was definitely on my mind when I posted about the Kindle: http://jseliger.com/2010/09/29/the-last-word-on-this-version-of-the-amazon-kindle http://jseliger.com/2010/09/29/the-last-word-on-this-version... . I only have about ~1,000 books, but it's easy for me to see that at some point I'll have more books than space, and I don't want to get more space than books. Still, I probably have at least 100 that I could discard with little loss, and I've become much choosier about buying and keeping nonfiction because so much of it is only worth reading once. And I've become choosier about not keeping fiction I don't love. Still, I'd use something like this: http://www.diybookscanner.org/ http://www.diybookscanner.org/ over the Snapscan.
- deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]
- mechanical_fish 16y ago
  Speaking as someone who has come to all the same conclusions as the professor in the original article, and who is almost literally standing over his bookshelf, drumming his fingers on the saw and trying to convince himself to try using it... ... the DIY book scanner is indeed tempting. But the payoff is so lousy. From what I can see, you'll tinker and tinker with the DIY scanner just to get it to keep the pages in focus and well illuminated, and to get the software workflow pieced together. Then, because you probably don't have a big budget or a machine shop, you won't get a robot that turns the pages, even an imperfect one that skips pages and occasionally mangles a book. ;) You'll have to turn the pages yourself, by hand. That labor all by itself is more expensive then 90% of my books. Meanwhile, the Scansnap is the real thing. My favorite piece of tech gear in years. It just works. The images come out nice. My magazine pages fit perfectly on the iPad screen. Google has done all the hard work, of course, robotics, professional book-handlers, and all. Pity that I can't access most of the fruits of that. So at some point you just have to try and convince yourself that it is no longer 1500 and printed books are a cheap commodity. As the article points out: Publishers routinely destroy printed books. They're just ink and paper. Even most of the books you think of as priceless collectibles are not particularly priceless. The really expensive part of an out-of-print book is the ability to read the words. If you want to decorate a room in beautifully bound old books, any old book will do. And, thanks to the economics of publishing, most of my really hard-to-find out-of-print books are old trade paperbacks printed on cheap paper. It will be a challenge to preserve these books through my lifetime anyway. Rather than wait until the things age and fall apart, I might as well take them apart myself. And this is how I argue to myself. But still, it's hard to bring myself to use that saw. What we need is a market in sawn-up books. Just rent a copy of your rare book that's already unbound and ready for scanning. Sell it on to someone else when you're done with it. Then you can keep the original rare book (in storage, somewhere upstate) but read the text whenever you want. The fact that this (AFAIK; IANAL) is legal but simply Bittorrenting a book you don't own is not is a very clear example of the brokenness of our legal system.
dustyreagan 16y ago
Something to consider if you started a digital book archiving business. Your clients would probably want their original books intact after digitizing. You'd probably need a device like Google uses that turns pages, rather than the ScanSnap approach. Might be justifiable to invest in building such a device since you'd like to digitize (and preserve) your own sizable collection. If the price is < buying a digital copy (if it even exists) of all your books, then build. Get a few clients, and recoup the costs. I'm sure there's copyright issues to deal with as soon as money changes hands too. Probably something you could work around though. Perhaps you could simply rent the machine out by the hour. Have your client sign a liability waver, and be on your way. :) Or heck, make it work like a coin-op copying machine.
- mhb 16y ago
  What if the client sent you his book, but you scanned an already cut-up copy of the book that you have in inventory? After the scanning is done, you send the client's book back intact.
sandGorgon 16y ago
You could use DJVU (arguably better than PDF for scanning books - supports OCR). There are a couple of scanning solutions for DJVU format.