So you want to know the fastest way to scan a book huh? Well after some serious thought and research I have found what I would consider the quickest way. As you can see on the video below you can be scanning 1 page double sided every 1.5 seconds with the Snapscan S1500M. It cost around $500 Canadian. You can feed approximately 65 pages into the machine at a time and with the odd paper jam which takes all of 10 seconds to fix you are looking at about 15 minutes for a 1000 page book. That means that in an hour you can scan around 4000 pages. That is phenomenal!
Well you knew this was coming. What’s the catch? The catch is that you need to take the binding off the book which some people would consider destroying a book. Destroy literally means putting an end to the existence of something so that seems like a misnomer (wrong word to use). I like to think of it as transformation. You are taking your book and moving it from physical form to digital form. So basically what it comes down to is are you willing to sacrifice your physical book for a digital copy. The books that I decided to digitize are mainly reference books so only need to read parts of them at any given time. This works great. So in the end it is up to you. Here’s a stack of books I scanned while watching TV one evening.
I thought of several ways to get the bindings off and finally one of my friends suggested that I take the books to a print shop. There they had huge shears that simply cut the binding right off leaving the book ready to be scanned. I ended paying about 50 cents a book to get them cut which I thought was a bargain.
While the price of the scanner and the fact that you have to cut your books up looks like a lot think about the alternative. You can buy a flatbed scanner for cheap so you can save your books but you will spend at least 10 seconds a page and you will have to sit there and flip the pages each time. With this system I put in 65 pages and come back a minute and a half late to reload. In fact I am writing this blog while my scanner is doing the work. With a flatbed scanner it would take 11 hours to do 4000 pages if you had the patience to sit there and flip the book every 10 seconds. The question is what is your time worth.
Couple this with the ease of reading PDFs on an iPad and suddenly you can have a library under your arm. Or your could say any reference sources offline, available anytime.
And now… when the seminary doesn’t have enough books… you can just email each other