

Digitizing the Personal Library - wyclif
http://chronicle.com/blogPost/Digitizing-the-Personal/27222/

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dustyreagan
I have the Fujitsu ScanSnap scanner mentioned in this article. That thing is
amazing and oddly addicting. It really makes you want to scan everything in
site. I suspect that's what is really going on here. Professor Halavais has
run out of loose papers and receipts to scan and has resorted to tearing pages
out of his books. ;)

~~~
wyclif
I submitted this story because I have somewhere approaching 3000 books in a
spare room that serves as my study, none of them scanned. Even though I enjoy
having them displayed on shelves I've noticed lately that this may be the
numeric point where being a bibliophile becomes painful; it's beginning to
hurt my goals surrounding simplifying my ownership of dead tree pulp. The
potential of having my library in digital format and searchable is pretty
exciting. It is a major burden to move that number of books when necessary.

As for the Fujitsu ScanSnap, I saw it recommended by the folks at 37 Signals
(DHH?) and looked it up and saw that it has 20ppm colour scanning and good
document feeding.

Doing what is recommended in this article is very time consuming to begin
with, but made even more difficult since you're depending on Adobe. Like the
author, I cringe at the thought of destroying perfectly good out-of-print
hardbacks.

I'd really love to start a business around electronic books and archiving.

~~~
jseliger
_Even though I enjoy having them on shelves I've noticed lately that this may
be the numeric point where being a bibliophile becomes painful; it's beginning
to hurt my goals surrounding simplifying my ownership of dead tree pulp_

This was definitely on my mind when I posted about the Kindle:
[http://jseliger.com/2010/09/29/the-last-word-on-this-
version...](http://jseliger.com/2010/09/29/the-last-word-on-this-version-of-
the-amazon-kindle) . I only have about ~1,000 books, but it's easy for me to
see that at some point I'll have more books than space, and I don't want to
get more space than books. Still, I probably have at least 100 that I could
discard with little loss, and I've become much choosier about buying and
keeping nonfiction because so much of it is only worth reading once. And I've
become choosier about not keeping fiction I don't love.

Still, I'd use something like this: <http://www.diybookscanner.org/> over the
Snapscan.

~~~
mechanical_fish
Speaking as someone who has come to all the same conclusions as the professor
in the original article, and who is almost literally standing over his
bookshelf, drumming his fingers on the saw and trying to convince himself to
try using it...

... the DIY book scanner is indeed tempting. But the payoff is so lousy. From
what I can see, you'll tinker and tinker with the DIY scanner just to get it
to keep the pages in focus and well illuminated, and to get the software
workflow pieced together. Then, because you probably don't have a big budget
or a machine shop, you won't get a robot that turns the pages, even an
imperfect one that skips pages and occasionally mangles a book. ;) You'll have
to turn the pages yourself, by hand. That labor all by itself is more
expensive then 90% of my books.

Meanwhile, the Scansnap is the real thing. My favorite piece of tech gear in
years. It just works. The images come out nice. My magazine pages fit
perfectly on the iPad screen.

Google has done all the hard work, of course, robotics, professional book-
handlers, and all. Pity that I can't access most of the fruits of that.

So at some point you just have to try and convince yourself that it is no
longer 1500 and printed books are a cheap commodity. As the article points
out: Publishers routinely destroy printed books. They're just ink and paper.
Even most of the books you think of as priceless collectibles are not
particularly priceless. The really expensive part of an out-of-print book is
the ability to read the words. If you want to decorate a room in beautifully
bound old books, any old book will do.

And, thanks to the economics of publishing, most of my really hard-to-find
out-of-print books are old trade paperbacks printed on cheap paper. It will be
a challenge to preserve these books through my lifetime anyway. Rather than
wait until the things age and fall apart, I might as well take them apart
myself.

And this is how I argue to myself. But still, it's hard to bring myself to use
that saw. What we need is a market in sawn-up books. Just rent a copy of your
rare book that's already unbound and ready for scanning. Sell it on to someone
else when you're done with it. Then you can keep the original rare book (in
storage, somewhere upstate) but read the text whenever you want. The fact that
this (AFAIK; IANAL) is legal but simply Bittorrenting a book you don't own is
not is a very clear example of the brokenness of our legal system.

------
Supermighty
I would love nothing more than to have all my books in a digital format, but
destroying the books in the process is horrendous.

There are better solutions for high speed book scanning that don't destroy the
book in the process. [http://www.instructables.com/id/DIY-High-Speed-Book-
Scanner-...](http://www.instructables.com/id/DIY-High-Speed-Book-Scanner-from-
Trash-and-Cheap-C/)

~~~
Pyrodogg
Here is another good resource for the non-destructive book scanning route.

<http://www.diybookscanner.org/>

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pragmatic
A nice scifi book about library scanning (among other things): Rainbows End
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rainbows_End>

A major portion of the book is dedicated to the destruction of the library's
printed materials for digitization purposes.

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Tichy
BitTorrent might be faster than scanning for a lot of books. Still, props for
getting down to work.

~~~
jokermatt999
BitTorrent could also be the next step as well. Yes, it's not legal for many
of the books you'd scan, but for out of print rarities, wouldn't it be better
to allow more people to read them?

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scorpioxy
I have a very small library of about 150 books that I am really proud of. I'm
proud of it because I started building it while still taking an allowance from
my parents.

But I'm also running out of space and I find that technical books become
obsolete in a matter of months. So I stopped buying books that talk about
frameworks and such and now only stick to the classics that won't lose value
unless the technology substantially changes. Others, I now purchase in a
digital format.(I have a Sony ebook reader)

Digitization is one approach, but I am too attached to the books to destroy
them. And I agree with the sentiment of the article, it's just not the same.

~~~
wazoox
I have a room actually dedicated now to book storage. And book shelves in all
bedrooms, too. In the living room, I have CD and DVD shelves. A quick
estimation would be : about 3000 books, 1000 magazines, 1500 CDs, 1000 DVDs.

The problem is that I won't ever buy DRM-laden shit. Evar, for chrissake, may
they die and burn in the pits of hell. That unfortunately forces me to buy
books and CDs, though I'm now an heavy user of my ebook reader and
gutenberg.org.

------
lovskogen
I think this will become more and more common. So publishers and book writers
would have to focus harder on making the physical object worthy of taking up
space.

It's the tactile feeling that differentiate books from OCR scanned pages in a
PDF. And wise publishers would use this differentiation to sell books when
e-books is more popular.

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motters
I also wouldn't advise destroying books. I have lots of books which are quite
old and rare, and may be valuable in themselves as historical artefacts.

~~~
nkassis
I don't think the books he was destroying were of any real value physically. A
lot of them where probably massively distributed. Like the article says,
publishers over produce and end up destroying tons of books all the time. Even
years later when they are stuck with unsellable stocks.

~~~
motters
In that case this might be ok, although because the OCR isn't perfect it would
still involve a significant amount of work if you have more than a few books.

