

How can I legally convert a “dead-tree” library (1050 books) to eBooks? - qubex

I have a largish dead-tree library&#x2F;bookcase of about 1050 books (all catalogued digitally, with titles and ISBN numbers). I’m looking for a way to legally convert them to eBooks without incurring a totally unreasonably large cost, mainly because I will be travelling an awful lot over the next few years and I need many of them for reference. I live in Italy and bought most of them from Amazon.co.uk. For a while I was quite enthusiastic because Amazon.com offered a programme whereby eBook copies of purchased books could be had for little or nothing, but (as far as I know) this was never extended overseas. I’m left wondering whether there is a manner of doing this economically and legally, or whether I will be faced with having to abandon the idea, incur a massive expense to re-purchase eBook editions of everything, or go off the beaten track.<p>Assuming the denizens of HN to be a fairly literate lot, I assume at least somebody has faced this same problem before, and assuming the technical prowess of NH denizens, I assume at least somebody has made a reasonably proficient stab at solving this.
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vitovito
They're your books, so you can scan them if you want. But you can't sell,
donate or give away the physical book once you've scanned it; the scan is a
copy/backup of the original for personal use, and if you get rid of the
original, you have to delete the copies, too. You can only destroy the
original.

There are bulk, destructive book scanners which will give you PDFs of your
books. You don't get the books back, because they cut off the covers and the
binding and feed them through a sheet-fed scanner.
[http://1dollarscan.com/](http://1dollarscan.com/) is an example.

If you don't want to destroy the books, your only real option is to hire
someone to scan them, or spend the time to scan them yourself.

Non-destructive book scanning machines can run thousands through tens of
thousands of dollars, or you can build your own for about a thousand dollars.
(USD)

I maintain the previous model of this at a hackerspace in Austin, TX:
[http://www.diybookscanner.org/archivist/](http://www.diybookscanner.org/archivist/)

That model claims 1000 pages/hour for practiced operator. 1050 books * 350
pages each on average means you can scan them all in about a month and a half
of eight-hour days. If you're paying someone $20/hour, that's about $7500, so
for under $10,000, you can non-destructively scan your entire collection.
($10,000 is what you'd pay for a commercial scanner, without the labor to scan
the books.)

I'd recommend looking for a hackerspace which already has one, and hiring
someone to scan the books for you as you need them.

~~~
walterbell
Is there any way to buy a kit for a nondestructive scanner?

1dollarscan is rumored to be watermarking/encoding the customer name in their
scans. If you highly magnify the page image, there are a large number of small
artifacts, which may explain the large file sizes, e.g. 150MB for a 400 page
book.

Their service ($1 per 100 pages) is cost-effective, given that Staples will
charge $2 to remove the spine from a book, without scanning. A spine cutter
costs a few hundred dollars.

~~~
vitovito
> Is there any way to buy a kit for a nondestructive scanner?

Yes, I linked to
[http://www.diybookscanner.org/archivist/](http://www.diybookscanner.org/archivist/)
in my original post. It has a "get a kit" link on the left. The forum post it
links to cites a cost of $1200 for a full kit, which are available for pre-
order.

The plans are also available at that same URL, and if you know someone with a
4'x8' CNC router, they should be able to help you put them together and cut
them for about half that cost in time and materials. Then you'll just need to
source the nuts and bolts and cameras and electronics yourself.

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walterbell
Scanning and image capture is only the start of the process of creating a
usable ebook. Post-processing workflow is also labor-intensive.

[https://www.memoryoftheworld.org/wp-
content/uploads/2014/12/...](https://www.memoryoftheworld.org/wp-
content/uploads/2014/12/scanning_manual_v1.2.pdf)

[http://www.konradvoelkel.com/2013/03/scan-to-
pdfa/](http://www.konradvoelkel.com/2013/03/scan-to-pdfa/)

[http://scantailor.org](http://scantailor.org)

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ColinWright
I think bumbledraven[0] has done this, although I think he is/was in the USA
while doing it. He was pleased with the result, but it is a destructive
process. Send your book, get back the e-book, you don't get the original back
because it's destroyed.

[0]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=bumbledraven](https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=bumbledraven)

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brudgers
If you have several terabytes of data the fastest channel is burning a hard
disk and shipping FedEx overnight. Which makes it worth mentioning that
$10.000 can buy a lot of parcel post. Come to think of it, it can buy a lot of
shipped used books as well.

Depending on your travel plans and reference patterns a low tech approach may
work.

Good luck.

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kw71
You might want to see how much of your collection is available in Library
Genesis [1]. I am no authority on The Law but see no moral issue with
collecting other people's scans of printed books that you own.

[1] [http://gen.lib.rus.ec/](http://gen.lib.rus.ec/)

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qubex
Thanks to everybody who took the time to answer. I'll look into the various
proposed solutions. Thanks.

