Hello from Lousiana

[Oddball]

Hello there,

I've been interested in scanning books for quite a while. Currently, I work for a great company that has been in business for over 50 years. They have accumulated a large number of parts catalogs and service manuals for a large variety of equipment. I figured, "Hey, why not digitize these and not worry about an eventual loss of knowledge?" So, I've set up a storage server to act as an archive for all these future e-books.

Right now, I'm in the process of brainstorming and getting supplies together to do a test run - using a smartphone and some open-source software. I've had some inspiration from some of the posts on this forums, and I can't wait to share my results with you all.

[BruceG]

Oddball
Another consideration would be to de-construct the material and put through a document scanner of photocopier to do the scanning. Then work on post processing. I volunteer at a Archive and we did that with a spare set on minute books. Once the material is in searchable pdf files it is possible to index the lot with Acrobat so the the lot can be searched together. At the moment we have nearly 200k pages indexed in this way made up of newspapers, books, minutes, leaflets etc. Some of the material is edited for correctness and some just checked to make sure the software has rightly identified the page into photo, table or text box.
On archive.org you may find some of your material has already been scanned. A great time saver.

[Oddball]

I have considered that, but ultimately, destructive scanning is a no-go. A lot of these books are from manufacturers that are no longer in business. I would also like to keep the books in as best a shape as possible. I'm pretty sure if I starting cutting the spines on these books that the owner would keel over right in front of me