[ChuckMcM]

1dollarscan for most of them. There was a short lived outfit in Sunnyvale that did some before a lawyer came by and presented a cease and desist.

I've also acquired a nice guillotine paper cutter and a Fujitsu ScanSnap 1500 and have probably scanned 40 or 50 "trade" paperbacks with it, 6 years of Scientific American, several years of Air & Space, Nature: Materials, and assorted other magazines.

[CydeWeys]

1dollarscan doesn't seem that good to me, what am I missing? It's $2 per 100 pages if you want OCR, and even then it's not clear what output format they're delivering -- it sounds like it's still a PDF? The entire point of eBooks to me is that you end up with actual text, not just scans. And $8 per average length novel seems like a lot just to chop a book in half, throw it through an auto-feed scanner, and run an OCR program.

[ChuckMcM]

When I started scanning my library I signed up for the "platinum" program which is $100 for 100 sets (basically 10,000 pages) with most of the enrichments turned on (OCR, etc) I paid the $1/set uplift for 600 dpi for technical documents with complex diagrams and occasionally I opted for color scans for some things.

For a textbook style book "chopping it in half and throwing it in a scanner" is a bit more work than the sentence would suggest. The most cost effective scanner for this is the Scansnap 1500 as it will scan both sides of a page, has a 100 sheet "feeder", and will OCR the text (using ABBYY which is included). It screws up occasionally and especially on magazines which are very thin / shiny paper it can take a while (and several rescans) to get the magazine scanned. So in general there is a pretty solid time advantage to using 1dollarscan. Especially if you can use your nights and weekends productively doing something else.

That said, once I didn't have another stack of 10,000 pages to go at the end of the month (I had scanned all the "obvious" targets, minus the McGraw-Hill books which they won't scan) I did switch over to manual mode with my scanner because while the total cost of the cutter and scanner was close to $2,000 (not quite 2 years worth of 1dollar scan services) it is a capability that can sit idle without too much cost.

[CydeWeys]

Do you share your scans (ignoring legality here), or are they all strictly personal?

[ChuckMcM]

No, I don't share them. The goal was to have my library be portable, and to a lesser extent more easily moved/preserved. These days I try to buy my reference books in a portable electronic form whenever possible.

[shmulkey18]

What kind of guillotine paper cutter did you purchase? How many page books can it cut through?

[ChuckMcM]

This one: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00BQGK1FQ/ although I replaced some of the clamp hardware as it didn't hold glossy magazines as well as I would have liked.