Best way to scan many pages from many books

[bigred177]

I have recently discovered the coolness of MS OneNote and I was reading where people scan pages from books and insert them into the note. I think that'd be a great way to avoid carrying 50lbs of books around to school every day. What would be the best way to scan 20-30 pages from each of 5 books or so? A flatbed scanner would take me years. Do those little hand-held scanners work okay for something like this?

 

[Matthew]

How about a digital camera?

 

[TangoWhiskey]

Camera phone, if you have one with enough megapixels.

 

[bigred177]

Ha, well there you go. Here I am trying to complicate things. Do you reckon the quality would be good enough to be able to OCR some pages?

 

[denverpilot]

It might. I have an iPhone App that turns a photo of a page straight into a PDF.

But for 30 page stuff, I'd use a scanner with a sheet feeder. Most of the better all-in-one printers have that these days, cheap.

 

[Steve Foley]

A sheet feeder requires destroying the binding of the book.

I bought a wand scanner like this

http://www.google.com/products/cata...a=X&ei=wvlMTtqzCcfL0QHG7O2dBw&ved=0CFcQ8wIwAA

and used it to scan this:

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/23582052/Motions/Chapter_06.pdf

I did not OCR it.

 

[wsuffa]

Intern.

 

[ScottM]

http://www.diybookscanner.org/

The dedicated, commercial grade book scanners that do not destroy the books are mucho expensive.

 

[TangoWhiskey]

http://www.diybookscanner.org/

Scott, that's a cool site. Thanks for sharing.

 

[bigred177]

http://www.diybookscanner.org/

The dedicated, commercial grade book scanners that do not destroy the books are mucho expensive.

Very cool. I will have to look into something like that.

 

[Cap'n Jack]

Digital camera, on a holder (like a tripod, I use a ring stand to hold the camera), 2 pages at a time. Using your favorite OCR software is optional.

 

[denverpilot]

A sheet feeder requires destroying the binding of the book.

I missed that it was a bound book at 00:37 or so this morning.

 

[gkainz]

or you just do a google search for the book you're interested in, and hit the website I saw a few weeks ago ... either in Pakistan or Afghanistan, and they had all the IT Tech books I could imagine, all scanned and served up in pdf format. Of course, I didn't save the link and don't have time to chase it down again right now.