
I would hate to be without books around me but see this as a way of having the books I need for reference in an easy searchable form saving time so I can read and enjoy the books I don't want to cut up. Now I'm building a nondestructive scanner for the books that I do want to keep, but also put on my iPad.Īll the books I have cut up and scanned are either duplicate copies I bought as I knew constant reference would wear out the first copy, or are cheap books picked up off of ebay or in charity shops. I was able to cut and scan my way thru many decades worth of several magazines in about a month and many, many books and I cleared up loads of space in my basement. I found a used cutter for a couple of hundred dollars on eBay.

Then I bought a LARGE guillotine cutter that I use for anything less than about 100-120 pages long and the cut edges never misfeed. It helps to fan the cut edges of the spine back and forth first before scanning to minimize pages sticking together. This works, but the jagged cut edges of the pages can cause misfeeds on the SnapScan. There are many books that I would never part with, but also many books that I would like to keep the content but don't care if I have the physical book ( magazines fit into this category).įirst I built a jig for my table saw to shear off the spine after removing the binding. Being the pack rat that I am, I had accumulated a whopping pile of books and magazines going back decades that I just couldn't part with, but that took up a lot of room.


I started out bookscanning with a SnapScan 1500 and fi6130 and they are both awesome machines capable of very fast and accurate duplex scanning. I know it is painful to see a book chewed up like that, but sometimes there are legitimate reasons to do so.
