Destructive scan: page removal

Book scanning methods that involve taking books apart.

Moderator: peterZ

caudwell
Posts: 2
Joined: 15 Sep 2010, 19:45

Re: Destructive scan: page removal

Post by caudwell »

Thanks for the advice everyone. The Fedex near me does the spine removal for $1.49, right in the store. Wouldn't have though of it without this forum. I put the clean pages through a duplex scanner in a university library, had it sent to me as a pdf, very nice.
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SeanP
Posts: 1
Joined: 19 Apr 2012, 16:32
E-book readers owned: Kindle, iPad
Number of books owned: 87
Country: USA

Re: Destructive scan: page removal

Post by SeanP »

This site is awesome, thanks everyone for sharing. I messed up a couple books doing it myself (ones I didn't care about, and I didn't read enough about it, used bad cutters, etc. it was dumb) but there's a lot of good info here. My question is, has anyone on here used a company to help like 1dollarscan.com to scan in some things? Or is it better to save up for a scanner yourself?
tresho
Posts: 29
Joined: 14 Dec 2009, 04:51

Re: Destructive scan: page removal

Post by tresho »

I have butchered a few of my books using the simplest method, a utility knife. Image

Blade must be razor sharp. Hack off the hard covers. Use a metal ruler thick enough to serve as a weight on the binding, wide enough so you don't cut your own fingers with the utility knife. Make as many passes along the glued line as it takes to separate the binding from the pages, cut away the freed binding as it peels back from the pages, remove pages in batches of several dozen as you progress & stack them in order, until you cut away the bottom page in the stack from the remains of the binding.
The cut edges tend not to be parallel/orthogonal with the other edges of the pages, this doesn't matter to me. The cut edges are incised and pretty clean. I don't rebind, just discard after scanning. Results are a pile of unbound pages, a sliced up binding and many thin strips of paper cut away by overlapping passes of the utility knife.
I have a cheaphttp://usa.canon.com/cusa/consumer/prod ... le_scanner sheet fed scanner, the Canon P-150, which will accept a stack of about 20 pages at a time into its scanner.

It scans both sides at once & feeds the results to the Paperport doc filing program in a wide variety of formats. For books up to 200 pages, it is easier for me to simply stack the pages in the input rack a few at a time while the scanner is pulling pages from the bottom of the stack.
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