[Lady Fitzgerald]

I'm using a Fujitsu Scansnap s1500 ADF scanner to digitize my books. Since I'm doing over 1200 books, I'm just making PDF copies of the pages, concatenated into a single PDF by the scanner software via Adobe Acrobat Standard (included with the scanner) and dispensing with OCR. I have to cut the spines off the books to do this. I started using a bandsaw to do this but that process left a friable cut edge that shed paperdust like a long haired dog sheds hair in the spring. No amount of cleaning could get rid of that dust. Glue from the binding also got onto the blade and tires and had to be cleaned off frequently. The dust was so bad it got into the scanner cameras and had to be professionally serviced, fortunately under warranty (although it took a bunch of esplainin'). I'm now using a guillotine type paper cutter that can handle up to 1 1/2" at a whack (thicker books have to be split in half first). That has dramatically reduced the dust. I'm using a small vacuum to remove the dust that does get on the scanner surfaces.

I first scan the covers, inside and out, to individual PDFs using a color setting. Then I scan the book pages themselves using the black and white setting at a light setting to help "filter" out specks on the page to a single PDF. The B&W setting also eliminates paper yellowing and gives fairly clean, clear text on a white background (heavily illistrated books would require grayscale or color settings which would give somewhat less desireable results). I then use Adobe Acrobat 9 Standard (came with the scanner) to insert the covers into the text PDF. I also scroll through the book to be sure pages were scanned in the correct order (human error happens) and that there aren't any pages that are oversized due to added margins (happens rarely; they are easily cropped in Acrobat). The whole process averages 15 minutes per book.

The scanned books read fine in Adobe Acrobat Reader or in Acrobat Standard (I use the latter since it works just fine and there is no point in having a redundant program). I found the JetBook Light has settings that allow the books to be read on a portable e-book reader (it fits in my purse) with some compromises. I set it to landscape and Fit to Width. That eliminates side margins. My largest books (roughly A4 page size) are readable that way although the print size is a bit fine (and I wear trifocals). Smaller books are much easier. Scrolling down each page took a bit of getting used to because each frame overlaps the previous one a bit and the last frame may overlap considerably. I find the advantage of portability outweighs the disadvanges. If a full page has to be viewed in its entirety, a much larger viewer, like a tablet, would be needed.

Of course, one could apply OCR (at least an hour), run a spell checker, check the spell checker, then edit for scanning errors not picked up by the spell checker. Since I'm such a nitpicker, it would take me as long to edit it as to read it. I don't have that much time (or patience; having ADD makes it worse) so I'm content with the PDFs. They are readable with the right readers.

Since the original books are being destroyed in the process, this is a media change and should pose no legal problems.