Comrades, I just got an old 80s theory book from an older comrade as a gift and you’re lucky to even find a used print-version anywhere, let alone a pdf version. Even the title of the book itself yields a handful of results at most. So I thought: This shit needs to be digitized.
Thing is, I don’t have it in me to pull this thing apart just to scan it. Scanning via phone is suboptimal in my experience and doesn’t yield the best results to read on a kindle/pdf-reader. I’d be willing to just retype the thing, but at 300 pages that’s quite the workload too.
Is there a good way to do this that’s not super out there, expensive or time consuming?
if you have money to buy a low-end USB-connected scanner (e.g. one of these, they’re probably on eBay for less), you can use that to scan it page-by-page (or two pages at a time depending on the book’s binding and the scanner’s dimensions)
Looks useful. There’s also ‘pen scanners’ and ‘personal document scanners’. Some are quite reasonably priced, although I’ve never used one so I can’t recommend any particular model.
I actually have a 2-in-1 printer with flatbed and the book is small enough to scan 2 pages at once. Unfortunately I can’t close the lid like at all because of the book and that makes at least half the pages mostly blurry
Can you put some poster board or something like that behind the book as you scan it? That might be similar to closing it.
Can also lay white A4 paper in an L shape around the book, directly on the glass. So long as the book is held steady, it should come out clean.