Hi, my name's Jeff. I have about 250 textbooks, all math, physics,
or programming and another 50 or 60 foreign language reference books
(dictionaries, grammar, readers) in Chinese and Japanese. Needless to
say, this is not a very portable collection. To make things worse,
I tend to write notes in all my textbooks. These are corrections,
clarifications, and other (long winded) explanations to myself. Now
that I'm retired and extended travel is an option, I find that I'd
really like to take it all with me. It's clear I need to build a
scanner!
Sometimes my notes get pretty far into the margin, so I'm going to
need a way to scan as close as possible into the spine of the books.
Second, once my collection is digitized, I'm not going to write in
my books any more. Instead, I want to write in the digitized copies.
But I don't want to destroy the original scans, so I want some sort
of overlay feature with the ability to display both the original page
and the associated overlay (if there is one). It would also be nice to
be able to add hyperlinks to pages of my books to other things: web pages,
local PDF documents associated with the book, etc. Of course, I want
to be able to do this from a very portable platform, like an iPad (which
I don't have). Of course I want it all searchable!
I guess I have my work cut out for me.