Stilly - (13 Jan 14 - 12:37 AM)

The books I've been scanning are just what's on the bookshelf. Unfortunately we have lots less shelf than books. Any that I might want for reference come apart and go through the scanner. A 500 page book in very good condition takes an hour or two to make a pdf. The ones in "less than good" condition may need a fair amount of cleanup, but seldom more than another hour or so. Most of them are "out of print" textbooks, or rare and obsolete references, although a few might be still "buyable." Very few are available in ebook form.

My "little scanner" runs around ten sheets per minute, but scans both sides in a single pass, so it (theoretically) gets 20 ppm. Epson makes a "big brother just like it that claims 80 sheets per min, but it's about $800 and I can't feed the pages that fast anyway.

Anything wider than 8.5" wide (narrowest way) has to go through the big scanner that only runs one side at a time, around 6 pages per minute at "publishing resolution" (300 dpi). Theoretically the big one can turn the original over and scan the other side, but that cuts the speed to about 3 pages per minute and it eats about one page out of ten in the turnover, for old books in the condition of most I have. I can generally get 500 pages through in just a little over an hour and a half(?) depending on how many rescans are needed. The big one can handle about 11.8" wide by approx 19" long, so "coffee table" books are mostly doable.

My ONLY purpose is to keep what's in "my books" and get them off the shelves. So far I've eliminated about 160 ft of shelf needed for the ones I've scanned, but LiK keeps putting her junk that used to be piled on the floor back up as more shelve get visible. (We started with over 308 feet of shelves in the old house, and still had piles on the floor. We only had room for about 220 ft of shelves in our new house, and LiK has "sewing materials" on a little over 30 ft of that.) "Her" books, of course, are mostly "too valuable" to take apart.

A side benefit is that the pdfs are "searchable"** (which has been a big help in the seven volume 3900 page "maintenance manual" for my truck - which had a totally inadequate Index.)

So far the books I've scanned are only about 405 GB, all in a little HD 3.5" x 5/5" x 0.8" instead of 160 ft of book shelf. (actually also on about three backup drives, but they're still small enough to carry along to the care home when I go.)

** Except for The Dictionary of Egyptian Hieroglyphics Vol I which totally baffled the OCR.

John