Sawing off book gutters for sheet fed scanning

Book scanning methods that involve taking books apart.

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mfmonk
Posts: 4
Joined: 23 Jan 2013, 07:13
E-book readers owned: Kindle
Number of books owned: 200
Country: US

Re: Sawing off book gutters for sheet fed scanning

Post by mfmonk »

stearn wrote:All the books I have cut up and scanned are either duplicate copies I bought as I knew constant reference would wear out the first copy, or are cheap books picked up off of ebay or in charity shops. I would hate to be without books around me but see this as a way of having the books I need for reference in an easy searchable form saving time so I can read and enjoy the books I don't want to cut up. I also have room to collect more.
I have a similar situation. I am paying 25 cents to $1 for older textbooks and science subjects at library book sales and other outlets (Better World Books). I enjoy being able to learn a topic from 2 or 3 different sources. I have the most math books-at least 7 versions of things like calculus from 1970-2000 which are around $1 each and when I use them I only need about 15 pages out of them, so destroying makes sense. In a perfect world with free storage I would not destroy them. However, the reason most of these books are so cheap is that people just don't have the room to store them.

I also had a project I was working on where I would pull all the indexes from the files and try to make them into a giant database.
tanstaafl.
Posts: 1
Joined: 22 Feb 2013, 19:18
E-book readers owned: Kindle
Number of books owned: 3000
Country: Mexico

Re: Sawing off book gutters for sheet fed scanning

Post by tanstaafl. »

StevePoling wrote:Is a circular saw the "right tool"? Has anyone tried this trick with a Dremel multi-max or a saber saw?
A circular saw is not the best option. I use a Bosch jigsaw with a metal-cutting blade and get quite acceptable results. See the attached picture.

I scan the images with a Fujitsu fi-6130 at 300 dpi. This scanner will do 30 double-sided sheets per minute or 3600 original pages per hour. I use Infothek scanner software which is immensely configurable to get optimum scans from less-than-pristine originals. Spend your time on scanner setup and you'll save 10 times that amount on subsequent editing.

After scanning and saving to a PDF file, I run the PDF through ABBYY OCR software to make it into an RTF file which I edit in MS-Word to clean up the chapter headings and global search-and-replace obvious problems like run-on dialog (search for quote-space-quote and change them all to quote-paragraph-tab-quote). When the book looks good enough I move it into Calibre and convert it to a MOBI file for my Kindle.

I can do a 400 page paperback book from jigsaw to Kindle in about an hour. This does not include serious proof-reading and spell-checking. If the book is uncomfortably ugly in my Kindle, I'll spend another two or three hours in MS-Word making it look at least as good as an eBook download from Amazon.com.

My collection is now at 3087 eBooks and growing. I also have about 3600 audio books, but that's a topic for a different forum. :)

tanstaafl.
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Paperback book "de-binded" with a Bosch jigsaw.
Paperback book "de-binded" with a Bosch jigsaw.
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