Good book scanners for book archival/data hoarding

[SkullTraill]

Recently, I've been thinking more and more about buying a good book scanner. I notice that sometimes we have book requests for books that seem to be pretty good/interesting, but are not (and never will be) available digitally. For a while, I've been apprehensive of investing in a book scanner to fulfill these requests because of the following:

• Some of the books are extremely expensive/limited edition - not worth the cost for the content. Many of them are simply expensive due to being collector's items and/or art books. Typically with little to no unique practical occult instruction/information.
• Storing the books will eventually become a problem
• I travel often, and may relocate abroad soon, so logistics of books/bulky scanning equipment might be an issue
• Some methods of scanning result in the destruction of the book
• Customs issues importing expensive books/scanning equipment
• Time consuming endeavour

However, I've come to feel like if I can keep it limited to the most valuable books in terms of content, and place a hard limit of 4-6 scan projects per year - that it may be somewhat feasible.

I've researched many methods of book archival, and have come across the following options:

• Scan with phone
  • Cheap
  • Easy
  • Portable
  • Time consuming
  • Low Quality
• Scan with cheap flatbed scanner
  • High Quality
  • Cheap
  • Somewhat portable
  • Time Consuming
  • Difficult
• Scan with tabletop book scanner
  • Fast
  • Easy
  • Fairly cheap
  • Mid-quality
  • Somewhat portable
• Unbind book (destroyed permanently) and run through a sheet-fed scanner
  • Fastest
  • Cheap
  • High Quality
  • Somewhat easy (need a book guillotine to unbind)
  • Destroys books
• Industrial-grade auto-page-flipping scanner (like those used by museums)
  • No

With those points in mind, and keeping my personal irl situation in mind... I've decided that the tabletop book scanners are probably the way to go.

Here are some of the options I've come across:

• CZUR ET24 Pro:
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• Fujitsu ScanSnap SV600:
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• There are cheaper ones on AliExpress

Now, I have no experience with any of these devices, and I am especially concered about the capabilities when scanning thicker, hardback occult books.

If anyone has any experience with these types of books, or scanning/book archival in general, I'd love to hear some thoughts.

Some key requirements I have:

• Decent quality for text (I won't be scanning art books, so it doesn't need to be photo quality, but the text/lineart/simple illustrations needs to be crisp and not blurred.
• Cheaper the better of course.
• Needs to have decent software, that ideally works on MacOS/Linux (I barely use windows anymore)
• Needs to be able to scan fast. 3 seconds per scan or less.
• Extra points for having cool features like scanning a 2 page spread in one scan and then automatically splitting into the individual pages. Also collating all scans into a PDF automatically etc etc.
• Relatively portable (not taking it around daily, but I need to be able to take it with me when I relocate)

Thanks!

 

[KjEno186]

For Linux software, Flathub has OCR Reader and Rescribe. I have no experience with either program, but it may be worthwhile for me to look into these programs since I have at times assembled images into PDFs that had no searchable text. As far as I am aware, they use Tesseract OCR as the basis of their character recognition engines. I have not used image scanners for a long time, and then it was for digitizing old family photos, negatives, and transparencies.

 

[SkullTraill]

For Linux software, Flathub has OCR Reader and Rescribe. I have no experience with either program, but it may be worthwhile for me to look into these programs since I have at times assembled images into PDFs that had no searchable text. As far as I am aware, they use Tesseract OCR as the basis of their character recognition engines. I have not used image scanners for a long time, and then it was for digitizing old family photos, negatives, and transparencies.

I am looking for scanning devices not really OCR software.

 

[spo30]

thanks

 

[Rowena]

I use a canon LIDE 110 at home at the moment, and a LIDE 300 at work - both are good for book scanning.

They are light & portable - using LED filaments instead of the very old-fashioned Quartz lights means they can run entirely off USB power - so no extra power-cables, which also makes them almost instant-on with no long warm-up for the lights.

The quality is pretty good, although anything above 600dpi takes forever to scan.

Color reproduction is good - so book covers scan well.

The driver support is good for most OS's, and supports standard Twain interfaces, so you can use 3rd party software if you choose.
I don't use their software, so I've no idea if it's any good.

Most issues with blurred text from flat scanners are software, not hardware based - the drivers support common scanner features things like descreening etc..., so you'll have to adjust the settings until you find a setup that you like, and then occasionally adjust it for individual books that have things like textured or blended paper.

Most of the books I scan are dismantled - which can be done with a box-cutter & bone folder on glued spines, or a thread-cutter for sewn spines, but it is possible to scan even very thick books by positioning the scanner on the edge of a desk & hanging the book over the edge, instead of trying to press it flat on the scanning plate. This only works on books with fairly wide center-margins, but it does work.

I've only used the overhead scanners you're looking at once, many years ago - as far as I remember you need a heavy piece of very clean glass to weigh the books down, otherwise every scan will end up with gutter shadows & text-distortion on the spine-side of every page. Also if the pages are at different heights, or lean down at the edges, only parts of each scan will be in focus.

I generally find that the post-work: tidying up the scans, straightening pages, etc... takes longer than doing the scans - actually putting together a pdf, bookmarking it, and doing the OCR is actually very quick.