A bit of the backstory (trying to be descriptive so you get the idea): I have a huge experience scanning entire books on the flatbed scanners. So far I scanned 37 books most of which I can't publish due to the copyright reasons. Frankly I learnt how to scan books all by myself and sadly hadn't come across any of the forums on scanning before. Nevertheless, my scans are (arguably) of a very high quality, with nearly a 100% of text correctly being OCR-ed (i.e. no blurry text, the text isn't curved, no rubbish on the glass and so on).
As you know, Since I use a flatbed scanner I have to do many things manually, such as page turning, spine pushing, and making sure the book edges are pushed down as well (for some large books, when scanning the very first and last pages the edges of the 'least side' might not touch the glass).
Now to the main question : When scanning books, I push the spine down to the glass. Its all usually all good, but I came across a large book with the very-very small margins. The margins are so bad that when reading something in the middle of the book, I either have to tilt my head or push the page to be able to read the text close to the spine. Obviously when trying to scan the book this problem is even worse. The best result I can get is when 2-3 letters close to the spine are blurry, and that's when I push as hard as I can.
I googled this issue up and this is what I found:
Since I using hand is not enough, I'm considering putting weights on the book's spine. The problem is, what kind of weight may be applied, do you think? I can only think of the dumbbells, but I reckon these won't stand stable on the spine (i.e. they will roll out).A common problem with scanning an opened book is "guttering", which happens when the spine of the book is not pressed flat enough, and the inside of each page, where it meets the spine, is curved against the glass. There's more about this, and an example, scan3, in the FAQ [S.17] "Why am I getting a lot of mistakes in my OCRed text?". To avoid guttering, make sure that the spine is held down throughout the scan. (Some people put a weight on the spine to hold the spine down on each scan; others just press their hand against it.)
P.S. I don't really care how much the spine is damaged as long as the book does not fall apart. I also do not want to buy the professional book-scanning gear to replace my flatbed just because of this book.