"Here's where the iPad has gotten me: I'm sitting with an old book in one hand and a utility knife in the other. My plan is to make the two meet, by cutting up the book and feeding the pages through a scanner.
The printed word has been shackled too long to paper, and I want to carry it around on my iPad tablet computer.
Cutting a book is hard, though. There's a mental block to overcome. After a lifetime of valuing books, I find it difficult to destroy one, even to preserve it in digital form particularly if it's a hardback.
The iPad, as a fantastic replacement for paper, deserves only half the blame for putting me in this position. The other half goes to the Fujitsu ScanSnap s1500."
I've cleared a sizeable amount of the "to sort" and "to scan" paper junk pile, but I've got two massively 1.5 inch thick college readers that are a minor obstacle in the face of my inexorable digitization of everything.
Why in the world would I be keeping overpriced college readers made from bookbound photocopied pages for so long a time?
Well, it was a class I liked, taught in a very unique style - we sat and drew plants over and over to learn their morphologies, by a TA I'd never forget - she was a biologist and an illustrator of the most beautiful natural history-type color pencil drawings, by an aging professor who was both retiring after this last class, and writing his magnum opus textbook, whose draft pages he passed to us in the form of college readers.
(I just Googled and realized the man died in 2007, and the textbook hasn't yet been published - Amazon has random dates of 2009 and 2011 up. Which makes the text pure gold in terms of memorabilia.)
The problem is that the readers are HEAVY. And CHUNKY. And only printed on one side, which is quite radically un-green for California, and must be part of some devious corporate conspiracy to drive poor college students further into debt.
Fortunately, since I have no attachment whatsoever to the structure of the reader, I'm perfectly willing to hack it apart in the name of saving space and preserving the memories digitally. Having the Scansnap around is one part of the 'ease-of-achieving' equation. The other half is how I'm going to remove the binding and loosen the pages for the ADF to eat it up.
Pros use a guillotine cutter. I don't think I have one. I don't think I want to invest in one unless I'm going to use it for tons and tons of books.
I -could- stop by a print shop and see if they have a cutter strong enough to slice the readers apart. I bet they do. I bet it wouldn't cost too much. But it would cost. And I'd have to heave the readers to a shop and back again, which puts a crimp in the easy-to-achieve aspect.
Some folks microwave manga books. Or steam them. Or iron them. Or hairdryer them. Basically, the idea is to melt the glue of the binder so that the pages loosen one by one. My readers are a LOT thicker than a manga book though.
Things I discounted: Saws, rotary blades or something funky called a bookbinding 'plough.' Some leave too much paper dust and could spoil the scanner, apparently. Others are just too elaborate and expensive. Some really enterprising fellows DIY'ed their own camera-based book scanner. A little too reliant on power-tools for me though.
I might end up just plodding away with a utility knife and a paper cutting mat if guillotines are too cost-prohibitive and the heat treatment didn't work.
There are some serious pros out there on the interweb though, my casual browsing found them deep in discussions on the forums, and I found pictures of spines neatly trimmed off like so many giant matchsticks. (Scroll all the way down.)
Which brings up the interesting point that some have made, and brings me back to the starting quote, "There's a mental block to overcome" in cutting up a book and destroying its physical form, in order for it to live (forever?) digitally.
I don't think I can do it to even a paperback. To a second copy of a paperback, maybe. But my stingy self would have to buy that second copy first.
Digitizing my paperback collection would be right out of the question. I value the dusty smell of paper a little too much.
There's a hoary shade of grey between the no-go of chopping up my precious paperbacks and the slice-and-dice-is-ok of my Odin Readers and already photocopied books though. Magazines.
For want of anything better to read besides the odd nonfiction and WH40K books, I recently picked up a habit of browsing the stands for stuff that caught my eye. Truth be told, I would be quite happy to read these in digital format. But once I get the bound stuff into my grubby hands, it still seems like sacriledge if I were to slice the pages apart, scan them in and then get rid of the pristine glossy sheets.
There are a couple of mags that I wouldn't mind getting rid of. PCgamer among them. (It was an attempt to see if it was worth anything. Besides the pretty pictures on shiny pages, RSS feeds get me news a little faster.) I entertain the thought of taking these out on a one way trip and leaving them somewhere for someone else to pick up. I suppose those are worth a try at hacking apart, though the perceived value of a book seems to disintegrate once it stops being bound.
Such a curious phenomenon.
Paper is paper. Pages are pages. Loose sheets are loose sheets. Gather them all up, and suddenly, you have the Inviolate BOOK.
I suppose it's like the whole "one doesn't cut money" mental block.
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