Document Scanners?

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freewheeling
Posts: 5
Joined: 24 Dec 2011, 18:26
E-book readers owned: Kindle
Number of books owned: 500

Document Scanners?

Post by freewheeling »

I've been a member of this forum for years, dreaming about digitizing difficult-to-find books on philosophy and various topics. I never seemed to have the time or the shop resources to do any serious fabrication, and I'm living on Social Security so haven't had much money for it anyway. I've actually digitized a couple of books by typing them out by hand and borrowing a scanner to grab illustrations and graphs that weren't easy to reproduce. This is a very time consuming way to reproduce books but it gave me some appreciation for what the world was like before the printing press when the only way to produce copies of books was in a scriptorium by monks working at desks laboring over manuscripts. I purchased a number of difficult to find books. Libraries are closing and selling their stock, which appears from time to time on Amazon. I recently bought a set of Thomas Sebeok's Encyclopedia of Semiotics for $150 on a splurge, and right after that the price shot up to $500. This is outrageous. How do people get access to these critical materials if you're not in academia? I don't mind that books become collector's items, but the text of those books is important beyond their collector value.

Anyway, I've decided that as much fun as it was to actually type a 1000 page book, which is sort of like running a marathon, it does consume a lot of time so I started looking around for book scanners. The CZUR caught my eye but I don't quite have enough spare cash to just plop down the money for that so was thinking about getting a flatbed scanner. Much slower and if I bend over a lot I get backaches, but they do produce very nice images. I had settled on something like the Plustek Optibook 3900. Also considered the Epson Perfection V600. But I kept coming back to that CZUR ET-16 and how neat that would be.

Then I came across the concept of "document scanners" which are used by educators to project an image from documents onto a screen for class viewing and noticed that these were also being used for book scanning, and were much cheaper that the CZUR. I was also intrigued with how they were being used in video production, although my main interest was still in book copying. Anyway, I ordered an IPEVO V4K. This seems to be the newer version of the Ziggi-HD which are selling for over $300, even though they seem to be discontinued. The IPEVO company seems to have very good customer service, probably because they serve the education industry. At any rate I have some ideas about how I might set up something that would produce decent results. If nothing else I could always scan the Sebeok series and then resell hard copies and get the money to buy the CZUR. People seem to have finally noticed semiotics. I know that image quality of an 8 megapixel camera might not be awesome, but it might be good enough so that I can borrow some of these library books and then make my own reference copies so I could take my library with me as a nomad.

I guess what I'm saying is that the products produced by IPEVO for a different purpose, might be adaptable to this purpose of home digital libraries somewhat in the way that Graphical Processing Units were adapted to the needs of cloud computing. (There's actually a word for this. It's called "exaptation.")
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