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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:
I've researched many methods of book archival, and have come across the following options:
Here are some of the options I've come across:
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:
- 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
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
Here are some of the options I've come across:
- CZUR ET24 Pro:
- Fujitsu ScanSnap SV600:
- There are cheaper ones on AliExpress
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)